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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

©lap.'- ©opgrigi^t !|]j*U-2-. 

Shelf 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



]^o))ular IBtrttton 



OF 



GEORGE MEREDITH'S WORKS, 

Each Novel will be complete in One Volume. 
Price, $1.50. 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

EVAN HARRINGTON. 

SANDRA BELLONI. 

HARRY RICHMOND. 

VITTORIA. 

RHODA FLEMING. 

BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 

THE EGOIST. 

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT, AND FARINA. 



ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers. 




^rW^r^r^j;^^ 



THE PILGRIM'S SCRIP 

OR, 

mit anti caisnom 
GEORGE MEREDITH. 



WITH SELECTIONS FROM HIS POETRY, AND AN 
INTRODUCTION. 

Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion 
of our knowledge consists in aphorisms ; and the greatest of men is but 
an aphorism. — Coleridge, Aids to Refiectioii. 

A composer of aphorisms can pluck blossoms from a razor-crop. 

Richard Feverel. 



BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1888. 




■ > 






Copyright, 1888, 
By Roberts Brothers. 



Bnt'btrsits grtss : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridgb. 



siry the truth, the truth I isH in the skies ^ 
Or in the grass ^ or in this heart of ours ? 
But O the truth y the truth ! the many eyes 
That look on it I the diverse things they see. 
According to their thirst for fruit or flowers ! 
Pass on; it is the truth seek we. 

Fair Ladies in Revolt. 



CONTENTS. 



PACK 

Introduction vii 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 7 

Evan Harrington 31 

Sandra Belloni 43 

Rhoda Fleming 55 

Vittoria 63 

The Adventures of Harry Richmond .... 69 

The Egoist S^ 

Beauchamp's Career 95 

The Tragic Comedians 133 

Diana of the Crossways 141 

The House on the Beach 175 

Vignettes in Prose 179 

Sonnets. 

My Theme 199 

The World's Advance 200 

The Discipline of Wisdom 200 

Appreciation 201 

Earth's Secret 202 

Sense and Spirit 203 



VI CONTENTS. 

foetus. 

Love in the Valley 207 

France. — December, 1870 210 

Men and Man 223 

The VV^oods of Westermain 224 

The Lark Ascending 227 

Autumn Even-Song 229 

By the Rosanna 230 

Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn ... 231 

Spring 236 

Modern Love 237 

Young Reynard 241 

Martin's Puzzle - 242 

Index 249 



INTRODUCTION. 



GEORGE MEREDITH, 

Born 1828. 



INTRODUCTION. 

In a recent address delivered by John Morley, he 
laments the fact that the literature of Great Britain 
is singularly deficient in aphorisms. It is France 
whose writers excel in this branch of letters. When 
we think of pensees, adages, maxims, or epigrams, 
our minds turn instinctively to the names of Pascal, 
La Bruyere, Joubert, La Rochefoucauld, Joseph Roux, 
and Amiel. What English name could be placed in 
this category ? 

In this same address Mr. Morley alludes to ^'One 
living writer of genius who has given us a little sheaf 
of subtly pointed maxims in *The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel,' " and adds, " Perhaps he will one day divulge 
to the world the whole contents of Sir Austin Feverers 
unpubhshed volume, ' The Pilgrim's Scrip.' " This 
writer of genius and author of the novel here men- 
tioned is, we need hardly say, George Meredith ; and 
his nine novels, after having hidden their light un^er 
a bushel for many years, are gradually finding their 



INTROD UCTION. 



way to our library shelves, eventually to be given a 
place not very far from our honored George Eliot and 
our well-worn Thackeray. 

A few years ago a copy of one of Meredith's novels 
was a rarity in this country ; but now there are two 
complete new editions of his works ; and, despite Mr. 
Meredith's own modest plea, "that the best of me is 
in my books," there are a large number of his admirers 
and friends who crave a less distant and more per- 
sonal acquaintance with him. To meet this wish, and 
making use of all the material we could find, we have 
prepared this bare and inadequate sketch, humbly 
hoping that we shall not infringe upon the man's 
rightfully guarded personality. 

George Meredith was born in Hampshire, in the 
year 1828. His parents died when he was quite young, 
and left him to be educated as a ward in Chancery. 
Of these parents little has been told the general pub- 
lic; but it is said that the blood of working ancestors 
flows in Meredith's veins, and perhaps this accounts 
for the sympathetic insight with which many of his 
homely characters are drawn. He received his early 
education in Germany, where he remained until fifteen 
years old. During these impressionable years Ger- 
man poetry, German music, German philosophy, and 
German humor all left their indelible stamp upon his 
youthful mind. It would be unjust to blame this 
foreign training for his faults of style, but it is not im- 
probable that he first studied the art of fiction from 
Jean Paul Richter; certainly the strong philosophical 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

and didactic note in all his literary work is distinctly 
Teutonic in origin. From Germany he was recalled 
to England by his guardian, who urged upon him the 
study of the law. This profession was distasteful to 
him, and he soon deserted it to give his undivided 
attention to literature. 

His first published effort was an unsuccessful vol- 
ume of poetry ; then came " The Shaving of Shagpat," 
a series of fantastic tales, and " Farina," a short story. 
" The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," which appeared 
when he was twenty-seven years old, at once attracted 
the attention of one or two fair-minded critics in Eng- 
land, and since that time each new novel has gained 
for him a slowly widening circle of intelligent readers. 
No writer has fought harder for fame and fortune than 
George Meredith. His life in London for many years 
was a hand to hand struggle with poverty in its harsh- 
est forms. He found himself hampered at the threshold 
of his literary life with pecuniary difficulties, and with 
heavy debts not of his own contracting. For one en- 
tire year, it is said, he lived exclusively upon a diet of 
oatmeal. Beside this burden of debt, and the dis- 
couraging reception extended to the *' firstlings of his 
muse," Mr. Meredith's early married life was fraught 
with much that was bitter. He married a daughter 
of Thomas Love Peacock, who is now remembered as 
an English humorist, author of "Headlong Hall " and 
" Crotchet Castle." His wife was a singularly brilliant 
and witty woman ; and her death after twelve years of 
marriage closed a tragic chapter of his life, which he 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

has never willingly opened even for friends to read. 
One son was the fruit of this union, who is said to have 
inherited some of his father's literary tastes, and now 
lives in Italy. 

After a period of loneliness Mr. Meredith married 
again, and for many years lived a quiet, frugal, hard- 
working life with his second wife, in their pretty little 
cottage, which is situated at the foot of Box Hill, in 
one of the loveliest valleys of the Surrey Downs. 
But again, two years ago. Death came into his peace- 
ful home, and again he was bereft of a most satisfying 
love. His second wife lies buried in the churchyard 
close by his cottage, and he speaks with quiet content 
of soon going to rest beside her. Two children, a 
daughter now about seventeen, and a son of two and 
twenty, who is an electrical engineer, still live with 
him. For the sake of this daughter, of whom Mr. 
Meredith is devotedly fond, he is now beginning to 
come out from his solitary retirement, and is occa- 
sionally present at social festivities. There is no din- 
ner-table in the county where he is not a welcome and 
honoured guest. The novelist's home life is simple 
and frugal. He was at one time a vegetarian, and he 
rarely drinks wine except with guests. He dines con- 
tentedly on the plainest fare, and is personally indif- 
ferent to the material pleasures of life. *' Contented 
poverty" he looks upon with great respect; and, as 
an author, he has never yielded a hair's breadth to the 
temptation of pandering to false literary taste for the 
sake of increasing his income. 



INTRODUCTION. xiu 

George Meredith's cottage stands in a pretty garden 
upon the side of a hill. On a higher level within the 
garden he has built himself a little chalet j this con- 
tains only two rooms, a bedroom and a study, for 
his own private use, and stands under hanging woods 
on a terrace which commands a beautiful and far- 
reaching view of the neighbouring hills. Here, sur- 
rounded by his books, he spends his days, going down 
to the cottage about eleven o'clock for what takes the 
place of a mid-day meal ; and again, between four and 
five o'clock in the afternoon, for a walk, which brings 
him home for dinner. He then remains with his fam- 
ily for an hour or two, returning to his solitude before 
ten o'clock to read until midnight. When guests stay 
at the cottage, as they often do, nothing in the usual 
routine is altered. But the host himself, and the 
kindly spirit of hospitality which pervades the home 
life, are the entertainment towards which every guest 
looks forward with happy expectation, and backward 
with pleasant memories. Then the talk is always in- 
teresting, sometimes brilliant; for Mr. Meredith is said 
to talk even better than he writes. The spontaneous 
charm of his speech cannot be caught on paper. The 
peculiarities of his style are modified, and much that 
is unpleasing when written down becomes agreeable 
in the wider range of spoken words. Links of mean- 
ing are supplied with sparkles all the brighter for the 
greater freedom. Face, gestures, laughter, and tones 
of voice, add a lucid commentary to the whole. When 
the guests are men, the evenings are finished upon 



xiv INTRODUCTION, 

the terrace of the study in fine weather, in the study 
itself in winter. Some especial literary work takes 
Mr. Meredith to London once a week. Then at the 
*< Garrick Club " the talking parties are renewed. 
There the brilliant novelist is easily recognized as 
one of the best talkers of the day. 

Nature gave George Meredith a robust and vigor- 
ous physique; but, partly by work, and partly by the 
experiments he is fond of trying upon his health, he 
has now become delicate, and in appearance he is de- 
scribed as seeming older than his years would indicate. 
In his younger days he was fond of walking, and he 
still enjoys a stretch over the downs. He used to say 
that he felt himself "pedestrian monarch of every 
country at which he looked." The Surrey Downs 
have been walked over and talked over by him hun- 
dreds of times. 

Like most literary men, Mr. Meredith is an omniv- 
orous reader, being catholic in his taste, and critical 
in his appreciation. He is a classical student, and 
has a wide acquaintance with the literature of many 
tongues. All the modern novelists of note, Tolstoi, 
Zola, Howells, Heyse, and George Eliot, he reads, 
considers, praises, and condemns, according as they 
seem to him to be deserving. He has a tenacious 
memory: a friend calls it "of iron, molten at the 
moment of impression, ever after cast in the form 
impressed." In regard to memory, Mr. Meredith 
himself asserts that it is all a question of heat : " If 
heat enough is excited by a fact, it will always be 



INTRODUCTION, xv 

remembered." He quotes accurately from all au- 
thors, the known and the obscure ; and his judgments 
of the minor authors are said to be peculiarly just and 
sympathetic. 

In politics, as any reader of Mr. Meredith's novels 
knows, he is an extreme Radical. He does not believe 
in the advantages of a " church-ridden government." 
His religious attitude is one of profound reverence 
for the Maker of the Universe, and of unconcealed 
contempt for the makers of creeds and systems. In 
his own life, which has not been an easy one, he has 
worked out for himself a vigorous, inspiring, and spir- 
itual faith. This shines through and lights up the 
pages of many of his novels, and the lines of many of 
his poems. At the age of sixty, after a life of deep 
experience, which has been furrowed by awful suffer- 
ing, he can stand with head erect and heart still young, 
proclaiming that " There is nothing which the body 
suffers which the soul may not profit by." 

It is because of the spiritual philosophy and golden 
wisdom of life with which not only *'The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel," but all of Meredith's books, are 
replete, that they deserve a permanent place in the 
literary world ; they are collections of precious stones 
gathered from an experience which is world-wide. He 
is a coiner of brilliant phrases, which he throws at us 
with all the insolence of prodigality. His range of 
thought and reading has borne fruit in an abundance 
of maxims and epigrams, which extend from the 
homeliest truisms to the most original and profound 



J 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

reflections upon life and death. These aphorisms of 
Meredith differ greatly in length ; and some are spun 
out inordinately, while others have that brevity which 
is the essence of the finest wdt. At times we come 
across a saying as worldly wise as any of which 
Rochefoucauld was guilty, and, again, we find some 
deep truth, which seems to have been wrung out of a 
profound spiritual experience. The great Rochefou- 
cauld revised some of his shortest sayings thirty times, 
while many we shall quote from this modern philoso- 
pher are, as it were, only rough outlines, — skeletons 
of great aphorisms which need to gather flesh and 
form, or more often to slough off morbid growth, be- 
fore they can equal the perfectly symmetrical adages 
of the classical French school. A French epigram is 
never more than a half-truth, but it is so compact in 
form that every word tells. But many of Meredith's 
epigrams, although quite true, are enigmatical in form, 
and even justify that unfriendly definition of an apho- 
rism as " A form of thought which wraps up some- 
thing that is quite plain in words which make it wholly 
obscure." The French parish priest, Joseph Roux, 
says, tersely, that thoughts are fruits, and words are 
leaves. Now George Meredith offers us plenty of 
fruit, — an abundance of original thought, — but it is 
often hidden under foliage so luxuriant, that only after 
considerable effort do we come at it. 

In each of his novels, this writer gives us, however, 
a number of short, brilliant sayings which have been 
skilfully hammered out of truth and experience. The 



INTRODUCTION. xvii 

parts of these sentences are like crystals, the particles 
grouping themselves together as if in obedience to an 
inner law. It is these sayings which stand out in our 
memories when we lay down George Meredith's nov- 
els ; and it is these sayings which we have tried the 
experiment of excerpting. 

Every author suffers more or less from being muti- 
lated, and from having his thoughts considered apart 
from their organic relations. George Meredith himself 
says that "A gathering of all plums is not digesti- 
ble ; " and the great danger in making a book of 
excerpts is that readers will never discover that the 
author whose scattered and fragmentary thoughts they 
enjoy had any unity in his life's work. The selections 
gathered together in this small volume may prove that 
the writer of them can be witty, sarcastic, satirical, con- 
templative, paradoxical, and humorous ; but that he is 
more than all these, more even than a great novelist 
and a clever poet, no one who does not read his 
complete published writings will ever be able ade- 
quately to appreciate. Those, however, who do study 
his novels conscientiously, — and they are novels 
which require study, — will find him ever empha- 
sizing one great truth which is the very kernel of 
his life's work. This truth, this gospel, is contained 
in the following lines, which are quoted from a private 
letter written by Mr. Meredith to the compiler of this 
volume. 

*' I have written always with the perception that 

there is no life but of the spirit ; that the concrete is 

b 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

the shadowy ; yet that the way to spiritual life lies in 
the complete unfolding of the creature, not in the 
nipping of his passions. An outrage to nature helps 
to extinguish his light." 

" To the flourishing of the spirit, then, through the 
healthy exercise of the senses," is the lesson we 
should learn from George Meredith. In his pub- 
lished works we find him again saying : " Our battle 
is ever between spirit and flesh, — spirit must lead 
flesh that it may live." *' We have the power of 
resisting invasion of the poetic by the common- 
place, the spirit by the blood, if we will." " The 
victory over the world, as over nature, is over self." 
"To have the sense of the eternal in life is a short 
flight for the soul. To have had it is the soul's 
vitality." 

These quotations, and rnany more scattered through- 
out Mr. Meredith's prose writings, express the essence 
of his philosophy. In an interesting article written 
by his friend and neighbour, Flora Shaw, in the " New 
Princeton Review," in March, 1887, she quotes from 
him these words upon the subject of death: "It 
should be disregarded. Live in the spirit. Project 
your mind towards the minds of those whose pres- 
ence you desire, and you will then live with them in 
absence and in death. Training ourselves to live in 
the Universal, we rise above the individual." Perhaps 
those often quoted lines from Browning, in "Rabbi 
Ben Ezra," may be said to contain Meredith's com- 
plete system of philosophy : 



INTRODUCTION. xix 

" Let us not always say, 
^ Spite of this flesh to-day, ,; 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! '" * 

" As the bird sings and wings, 
Let us cry, '■ All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.* " 

Both Meredith and Browning recognize the full 
"value and significance of flesh." They are *' human 
at the red-ripe of the heart," and are free from any 
taint of mediaeval asceticism. They are rare examples 
of great spiritual teachers, who rejoice in the full 
development of the physical life. The spiritual life 
is the flower, and the roots of that flower must be 
firmly fixed in the earth, or the blossom will have 
neither strength nor beauty. Mr. Meredith's con- 
ception of the spiritual life is less tangible and less 
personal than that of Mr. Browning. The one is 
pantheistic, the other is Christian. The one recog- 
nizes a religion of law, the other one of love. The 
one is pre-eminently a philosopher, the other a 
prophet and a seer. No poet ever felt the "joy of \J 
earth," the beauty of the material universe, more 
fully than Meredith. He loves it, — 

** With a love exceeding a simple love of things 
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck." 

That same wild joy in living of which Browning 
writes so rapturously in " Saul," runs through many 
passages of Mr. Meredith's prose and poetry. He feels 
an especial kinship with nature, and learns his deepest 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

lessons from the gathering clouds, the rich sunsets, the 
rosy dawn, and the tender hues of early spring. It is 
no theological, anthropomorphic, or even incarnate 
deity that brings Meredith strength and peace ; but 
through the beauty and grandeur of nature he ap- 
proaches the footstool of God. 

Critics have often called George Meredith a cynic, 
and have complained of him for being sarcastic and 
satirical ; they have even likened him to his own in- 
human and odious creation, Adrien Harley ; but he is 
cynical only as Browning and Clough are cynical, — 
as, indeed, all ideahsts are cynical, — that is, they have 
a conception of a perfect universe ; the very grandeur 
of their conceptions makes the real world around them 
seem dwarfed and petty. At times, and in certain 
moods, they see nothing but the defects in human 
nature, just because their standard is superhuman; 
then the "spirit which denies" takes possession, and 
they groan and sneer ; but this kind of cynicism is 
only a form of idealism ; and not one of these poets is 
ever hopeless for the future of the race. Meredith 
sees the largest possibilities for humanity, if it will 
only subdue its passions and exalt its reason. Accord- 
ing to Meredith's theory of life, " Reason, pure reason, 
is the only guide for man. It is our only means of 
spiritual progress." The grand mission of the poet 
and of the philosopher is to look forward hopefully 
for the spiritual progress of mankind ; and it is with 
this class of writers that Meredith belongs. His 
cynicism is only occasional and superficial, one of 



INTRODUCTION, xxi 

the myriad moods to which all poetic minds are 
prone. 

Among artists — and under this category we include 
poets, musicians, and men of letters — we find two 
broadly differentiated types. Those of one type pro- 
duce their best work under intense excitement, when 
the creative impulse takes possession of them. They 
seem then to be controlled by some greater force than 
their own personality. But artists of the other type 
are always conscious of the laws of their art, and can 
easily subordinate their creative power to their reason. 
Granted, therefore, an equal amount of genius, and 
the nearest approach to perfection in style will be 
found in a writer who has learned to control his cre- 
ative impulse and put it under the curb of his reason. 
Unfortunately, however, we rarely see this combina- 
tion ; the faultless writer lacks originality, and the 
original writer neglects style. 

George Meredith is pre-eminently original ; he has 
a vast ungoverned fury of creative energy ; and his 
feelings are so tumultuous that he has no time to 
arrange or restrain the words which rush forth as if 
impelled by a torrent of emotion. The Italian ex- 
pression, con furia, applies admirably to Meredith's 
prose style. Classical rules are nothing to him. He 
coins his own words, invents combinations, and is 
often guilty of forming the most outrageous senten- 
ces. His picturesque description of Carlyle's style is 
equally applicable to his own eccentric use of the 
English language : "A wind in the orchard style, that 



xxii INTRODUCTION 



tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with 
uncouth bluster ; sentences without commencement 
running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves 
against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a 
hand to street slang. All the pages in a breeze, the 
whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in 
the mind and the joints." Carlyle's description of 
Richter's word-painting also applies to Meredith : 
"His language is Titanian, deep, strong, tumultuous, 
shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand 
elements, and winding in labyrinthine mazes." If the 
purest literary style be that of writers like Southey, 
w^here the reader can turn page after page without 
taking note of the medium of communication, then 
Richter, Carlyle, and Meredith, with their daring met- 
aphors, pungent epigrams, and brilliant rhetoric, are 
only charlatans. But if style in literature be — like 
facial expression in a portrait, or atmosphere in a 
landscape — the strongest proof of the artist's indi- 
viduality, then we can welcome the highly-coloured 
prose of Meredith, and delight in his fervid elo- 
quence, without stopping to challenge him every 
time he steps aside from the commonplace and con- 
ventional. What Horace says of Pindar's style, may, 
we think, without sacrilege, be affirmed of Mere- 
dith's prose : — 

" Pindar, like torrent from the steep, 
Which, swollen with rain, its banks o'erflows, 
With mouth unfathomably deep, 
Foams, thunders, glows." 



INTRODUCTION. xxiii 

When we turn from considering Mr. Meredith's 
prose style to considering his poetry, we naturally 
expect his gift of language, his fertile fancy, and his 
spontaneity to be also characteristics of his verse. 
Mr. Meredith's prose is the prose of a poet ; but 
where in his poetry do we find that exquisite lyrical 
touch which delighted us in passages of " Richard 
Feverel" and " Beauchamp's Career".'^ There is an 
odd mixture of the poet and the philosopher in Mere- 
dith's mental make-up ; in his poetry the philosophic 
element is obtrusive. The didactic instinct — that 
fatal pedagogic hand which has strangled the muse 
of many a poet — claims him, and forces him to de- 
scend from Mount Parnassus and take possession of 
the schoolmaster's chair. It is easy to recall occa- 
sional lines in *' The Woods of Westermain " which 
are melodious ; there is also a succession of enchant- 
ing fancies in " Love in the Valley," and some of its 
verses are as graceful and unfettered as the joyous 
carolling of song-birds ; but a poet must be judged 
by the mass of his work, and by far the largest part 
of Mr. Meredith's verse is harsh, uncouth, and scarcely 
intelligible. Take such lines as these ; — 

*' Still he heard, and dog-like, hog-like, ran, 
Nose of hearing till his blind sight saw 
Woman stood with man 
Mouthing low at paw." 

Does the reader think this deserves the name of po- 
etry? Or, take the poem called "The Last Conten- 
tion," in which Mr. Meredith describes the young soul 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 

hampered by the aged body ! It is a remarkable 
poem, and the conception is entirely original, but how 
involved and fantastic is the phraseology, and how 
unlovely is the metaphor ! 

" Young captain of a crazy bark, 
O tameless heart in battered frame ! " 

An audacity that many critics claim to be wholly 
affected, is one of the strongest peculiarities of Mere- 
dith's poetry. Instead of remodelling his style to suit 
the taste of the critics, who fell upon his first volume 
of verse like wolves and tore it to shreds, we can fancy 
the indignant poet, like his own creation, Diana, in 
" a fit of angry cynicism composing phrases as baits 
for critics to quote condemnatory of the attractiveness 
of the work." The sonnet called " The Point of 
Taste " bears marks of having been written when Mr. 
Meredith's ire had been roused by the injustice of 
contemporary criticism : — 

" Unhappy poets of a sunken prime ! 
You to reviewers are as ball to bat. 
They shadow you with Homer, knock you fiat 
With Shakespeare ; bludgeons brainingly sublime 
On you the excommunicates of Rhyme 
Because j^ou sing not in the living fat, 
The wiry whiz of an intrusive gnat 
Is verse that shuns their self-producing time. 
Sound them their clocks with loud alarum trump, 
Or watches ticking temporal at their fobs, 
You win their pleased attention. But, bright God 
O' the lyre, what bully-drawl ers they applaud ! 
Rather for us a tavern-catch and bump 
Chorus, where Lumpkin with his Giles hobnobs." 



INTRODUCTION. xxv 

No one can wonder that the author of that great 
heart-tragedy, " Modern Love," should have been in- 
dignant at seeing the tinkling verses of mediocre 
poetasters, and sentimental dilettanti, preferred to his 
own ; for the author of '• Martin's Puzzle," '' Love in 
a Valley," '' Melampus," " The Lark Ascending," and 
that grand, impassioned "Ode to France," had the 
melodic faculty when he chose to use it. It would 
be the greatest possible advantage to Mr. Mere- 
dith's poetical reputation if some sympathetic critic 
would collect his best poems, and let the public 
judge of them apart from his worst. The collec- 
tion would be small, — and a few of these best 
poems we include in this volume of excerpts, — but, 
taken altogether, it would show the author's poetic 
possibilities. 

The poet Meredith's aim, according to his own defi- 
nition, has been to utter " the truthful in a tuneful way." 
But the tuneful he has always willingly sacrificed to 
the truthful ; which accounts for many of his poetic 
failures. Perhaps, had Meredith persisted in his poet- 
ical work and defied adverse criticism, as did Brown- 
ing, he might to-day have shared Browning's long 
delayed laurels. Certainly the two men have much 
in common ; the same psychological problems interest 
them, and the same strong human emotions stir them. 
Vigorous intellectuality and rude strength are the 
salient features of their poetry; and either is always 
ready to sacrifice beauty to truth, form to fact. It is 
not so much "born poets " as poetic thinkers that will 



XXVI INTRODUCTION, 

appreciate the best of Meredith's poetry ; and is not 
this true also of Browning's poetry? 

The poetry of neither of these writers is " Meat for 
little people or for fools." It is only for those who 
crave and can digest a stimulating intellectual diet. 
For such, and for such only, some of Mr. Meredith's 
poems will be a revelation, and will teach a lofty and 
spiritual philosophy. " Great thoughts insure musical 
expression," Emerson says; and we can easily imagine 
the saying falling from Meredith's lips. Beautiful 
expression is something he never seeks for itself; if 
the impression is exquisite, the expression will take 
care of itself ; the imagination awakened will bring 
its own language. This is the theory of one who 
has been sometimes called "the Inarticulate Poet." 
There are lines, however, — such as the description 
of Spring from " Grandfather Bridgeman," — which 
have a delicate lyrical grace, and show Meredith's 
capacity for the purest poetic work. These bewitch- 
ing lines prove that he was born with the poet's eye 
and ear : — 

" The day was a van-bird of summer ; the robin still piped, but 

the blue, 
A warm and dreamy palace with voices of larks ringing through, 
Looked down as if wistfully eying the blossoms that fell from 

its lap ; 
A day to sweeten the juices, — a day to quicken the sap ! 
All round the shadowy orchard sloped meadows in gold, and 

the dear 
Shy violets breathed their hearts out, — the maiden breath of 

the year ! " 



INTRODUCTION, xxvii 

Meredith, however, deems the philosopher's mission 
to be the nobler. Power he thinks has not been given 
us for pleasure only. The work of the prophet is above 
that of the poet. Until, therefore, we appreciate this 
writer's deep sense of his responsibility as a teacher 
we shall not understand either his fiction or his poetry. 
He loves Nature passionately, but he writes of her in 
order to show that "she can lead us, only she, unto 
God's footstool, whither she reaches." Meredith's 
vein of philosophy is like a musical theme, often con- 
cealed, but always to be discovered underlying every 
portion of his literary w^ork. The great Apostle to 
the Gentiles never preached more earnestly that " to 
be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually 
minded is life and peace," than does this nineteenth 
century preacher, who, whether in poetry or in prose, 
is always hurling anathemas at the corruptions, the 
shams, and the sentimentalities of the age. If Mr. 
Meredith's philosophy is like a musical theme, his 
character and life form a most noble accompaniment. 
Who can look at his intellectual, delicately cut, and 
highly spiritual face, without feeling sure that he is 
one of those who, " after great tribulation, have over- 
come the world ".f^ In his own life George Meredith 
has proved the greatest and most prominent tenet of 
his philosophy, — that it is possible to rise above the 
temporal and personal, however dark and painful it 
may be, and to live wholly, and even joyfully, in the 
Universal and Eternal. 

As we turn now to consider impartially the place of 



xxviii INTRODUCTION, 

Mr. Meredith as a novelist, we must remember that 
none of his novels, however much they may be admired 
by a few, have ever attained what can be called gen- 
eral popularity. For nearly fifty years "The Ordeal 
of Richard Feverel" was a forgotten book; and nei- 
ther " Beauchamp's Career " nor " The Egoist " made 
more than a fleeting impression on literary London at 
the time of its first publication. If we stop to seek 
the reason for this strange neglect, we find ourselves 
forced to the opinion that Meredith wrote over the 
heads of most readers. He would not make any 
concessions to the weaknesses of his public. " Of 
me and of my theme think what thou wilt!" — he 
wrote proudly. He was content to impress selected 
minds, and to enjoy the special function of the great 
man's intellect, which, according to Walter Savage 
Landor, " puts in motion the intellect of others." 
There are two requirements which Mr. Meredith 
makes of his readers : first, that they shall approach 
his novels with intelligent and wide-awake minds; 
and secondly, that they shall not shrink from facing 
and acknowledging the sternest facts of life. Now 
most habitual novel readers are not intelligent ; they 
have weakened their minds by living upon what Car- 
lyle calls sarcastically *'pap and treacle fiction"; and 
they are utterly unable to read any book which re- 
quires concentration of their intellectual faculties. 
Then, among intelligent readers, there is a large class 
who refuse to look at the unpleasant side of life ; who 
positively decline to read any book in which the sins 



INTRODUCTION, xxix 

of men and women are exposed unvarnished to their 
gaze. By such readers — and there are many such — 
"Anna Karenina" is condemned, and " The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel " is considered unendurable. More- 
over, some critics and devourers of sentimental fiction 
often fail to perceive a difference between a great 
philosophical novel with a distinct moral purpose, and 
the worst examples of French realistic fiction. That 
a writer touches upon the awful subject of illicit love 
is sufficient to condemn him in prudish eyes ; and the 
fact that he draws a terrible lesson from its portrayal 
does not, for them, redeem his book. Accordingly, 
Meredith's courageous and almost coarse treatment of 
sin in "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel " and " Rhoda 
Fleming" has closed these novels for all readers who 
refuse to look outside their own narrow circle of ex- 
perience into the broader field of the world's tempta- 
tions and moral strifes. Thus, at the beginning, these 
novels were ruled out by the subscribers to Mudie's 
library, and were kept from the inevitable approval 
of the more cultivated novel reader. " The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel " was not sentimental enough to draw 
largely for its readers from London boudoirs ; it was 
not immoral enough, and required too much mental 
exertion, to find immediate readers in the clubs and 
the mess-rooms. 

Judged from the standpoint of literary excellence, 
*' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel " is the most artis- 
tic of all Meredith's books. It is greater as a whole, 
and it is greater in each of its parts. In it the reader 



XXX INTRODUCTION, 



{ 



is called upon to explore the depths of life; and per- 
haps no young person puts down this sad portrayal of 
temptation, sin, and suffering with exactly the same 
views of human nature he held when he took it up. 
Parts of the book show intense dramatic power, and 
some passages and scenes are lyrical masterpieces. 
Who, that has read it, will ever forget that exquisite 
description of the gentle Lucy, Richard's girl-wife ! 
Or what cynic in fiction is as subtlely satanic as 
Adrian Harley ! Above all, what a capacity for analy- 
sis is shown in the character of the unconscious hypo- 
crite, Sir Austm Feverel ! It is in the grouping of 
these characters, also, that a master's hand is shown. 
They are arranged as skilfully as tableaux, — the au- 
thor bearing in mind not only each character by itself, 
but each in relation to all the other groups. There 
are two remarkable scenes in '' The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel," which no sensitive reader can forget. Rob- 
ert Louis Stevenson does not hesitate to pronounce 
one of them — the final interview between Lucy and 
Richard Feverel — to be " the strongest scene, since 
Shakespeare, in the English tongue." The other 
scene, the first meeting by the river, is very different 
from this, but equally great ; it is pure romance, and 
idyllic in its sweetness ; it is the most thrilling, en- 
chanting love-scene ever described by any English 
novelist; and it lingers in the memory as linger mu- 
sical passages in Browning's " Blot on the 'Scutcheon," 
or sweet melodies from the German Folk-Songs. It 
is far superior to any love-scene in George Eliot or 



INTRODUCTION. xxxi 

Thackeray; for it contains the essence of first love 
in its purest, most ideal form, — first love as it should 
come once into the life of every human being. 

Besides these two intense scenes, the one joyous, 
the other tragic, this novel is surcharged with apho- 
risms ; it is a necklace of rich gems in which jewels 
of all kinds find place ; sudden meteors of thought, 
comet-like flashes of wit, keen shafts of satire, and 
bursts of melodious rhetoric, compose the brilliant 
background of the novel ; and against this, aided by 
it, the w^ell-m.eaning but mistaken Bennet, the tender 
Lucy, the fair Lady Blandish, and the stormy Richard 
act out the dramas of their eventful lives. What a 
wonderful spectacle of life is " The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel"! It is not only a work of genius, but a 
great moral tragedy ; and it cannot fail to make an 
indelible impression upon the mind of every thought- 
ful reader. 

It is only after we have exhausted the short walks 
in our neighborhood, where the paths are already 
cleared, that we attempt the more distant excursions, 
and cut our way through bush and bramble ; so it is 
that, after we have enjoyed George Eliot's smooth 
English style, and Thackeray's simple conversational 
form of narrative, we shall feel tempted to break 
through the rough and tortuous sentences of George 
Meredith. But the effort once made, the rough path- 
way is soon forgotten, and we are amply repaid by the 
beauty of the landscape. The first steps demanded in 
overcoming the peculiar difficulties of Meredith's style 



xxxii IN TROD UCTION. 

require concentration and perseverance ; but, these 
once taken, the reader becomes absorbed in the 
powerful and impressive soul-dramas which the great 
novelist creates and exhibits with such marvellous 
power. 

"The Shaving of Shagpat," that strange web of 
Eastern fancies, was published in 1855, and was Mere- 
dith's first prose work. Next came " The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel," in 1859, and in 1861 appeared "Evan 
Harrington." The contrast between "The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel " and " Evan Harrington " is marked. 
For the first novel is a tragedy, and stirs our deepest 
and saddest emotions ; the second novel is a comedy, 
and amuses us by making the antics of the human ani- 
mals seem outrageously comic and absurd. " Evan 
Harrington " is devoted to portraying the vices and 
follies of fashionable life, and the particularly amusing 
vicissitudes of the Harrington family. The hero of 
the book, Evan, was the son of " Old Mel," a fashion- 
able tailor; and the efforts made by his sister, the 
Portuguese Countess de Saldas, to conceal her father's 
profession, and to assist her brother to make a good 
marriage, are described with delicious humour. The 
character of the scheming Countess is drawn with 
immense skill, and even suggests that queen of ad- 
venturesses, Becky Sharp ; but " Vanity Fair " is a 
satire, while " Evan Harrington " is an extravaganza ; 
in the one novel real people walk and talk much as 
they do in life; in the other, the characters are all 
exaggerated, painted in broad scenic colors ; they 



INTRODUCTION. xxxiii 

need to be looked at from a distance, and do not bear 
comparison with real personages. The men and 
women in " Evan Harrington " talk in aphorisms, 
and have metaphors at their tongue's end. They 
weary us by their perpetual vivacity, and their strained, 
inflated style of talking becomes after a time insuffer- 
ably tedious. Unconsciously, Meredith permits his 
own extraordinary wit and brilliancy to shine through 
all his creations, forgetting that the habit of convers- 
ing in epigrams is rare in common life. There is an 
extraordinary amount of irrelevant matter in this 
novel ; and irrelevant matter, as a sharp critic says, 
never lengthens, but buries a story. Meredith often 
amuses himself by attempting a long series of mental 
gymnastics ; he starts some idle topic of conversation, 
and then follows it on through endless ramifications 
until it and the reader are completely exhausted ; his 
own mind is so synthetic, that it cannot help adding 
to anything he takes into it. But there is some vigor- 
ous character-drawing in " Evan Harrington " ; and 
the writer makes the most of the contrast between 
the complex, wire-pulling, deceitful, but fascinating 
Countess, and the wholesome, clear-souled young 
English girl. Rose Jocelyn, who is described as being, 
at one moment, ^' the halcyon, and at another the 
stormy petrel," but is always ingenuous and admira- 
ble. In the love-scene between Evan and Rose, the 
tender poetic vein in Meredith's nature is again ap- 
parent : " Holy to them grew the stillness ; the ripple 
suffused in golden moonlight; the dark edges of the 

c 



xxxiv INTRODUCTION. 

leaves against superlative brightness. Not a chirp 
was heard, nor anything save the cool and endless 
carols of the happy waters, whose voices are the 
spirits of silence. Nature seems consenting that 
their hands should be joined, their eyes intermin- 
gling." This making an harmonious background out 
of nature, and using it to give an atmospheric quality 
to a love-scene, Meredith understands better than any 
modern writer except Turguenieff ; many of Mere- 
dith's love-scenes are prose idyls ; they are Tenny- 
sonian in their pastoral sweetness. 

Following "Evan Harrington," in 1864, appeared 
"Emilia in England," and in 1865 " Rhoda Fleming." 
We prefer to consider " Rhoda Fleming " before we 
do "Emilia in England," published now under the 
name of " Sandra Belloni," because this last belongs 
with " Vittoria," the two being in purpose halves of 
one novel, though published separately. 

In "Rhoda Fleming," Meredith turns away from 
fashionable society, and devotes himself to a study 
of life among the sturdy men and women of Kent. 
The virtues of courage, pride, and constancy, which 
are displayed by the hard-working country folk, are 
especially emphasized in this story. Rhoda Fleming, 
the heroine of the novel, with her strong, proud na- 
ture, and her indomitable will, is a new type of woman, 
in fiction ; all her faults arise from her strength of 
character, and her over-confidence in her own judg- 
ment. She has a grand contempt for weakness and 
a holy scorn for sin. Her passionate, romantic love 



INTRODUCTIOiV. xxxv 

for her sister, and her mistaken belief in that sister's 
purity, give as pathetic a situation as any to be found 
in modern fiction. Edward Biancove, also, is a well- 
conceived character, — one of the complex, many- 
sided natures our involved modern civilization tends 
to produce; notwithstanding his delicate sensibilities 
and strong human feelings, he is unable to accept the 
responsibility of his acts, and goes through life, shirk- 
ing consequences ; this fatal lack of courage and ten- 
dency towards sentimentalism lead him to commit 
infamous deeds and cause endless suffering. The 
flimsy, fascinating Mrs. Lovell is another interesting 
study. What a contrast between her character and 
that of the devoted Dahlia ! The one is all sincerity 
and heart ; the other is scheming, secretive, and 
enigmatical. 

Two more remarkable life-studies occur to us as 
we think over " Rhoda Fleming," — the spendthrift 
Algy and the miser Anthony ; both these are wholly 
original conceptions ; but what a grim, sad lesson 
this novel teaches ! How pitilessly and unflinchingly 
does the writer make us face the consequences of 
sin ! How full of tragic possibilities does life seem 
as we close its covers ! Dahlia Fleming's fall and 
Edward Biancove's sin are facts which occur very 
frequently in fiction, and constantly in life ; and Mere- 
dith has not let one thread in the awful wxb of con- 
sequences escape him ; the fall of the proud, loving 
Dahlia, and the shame it brought upon her home, is 
so painful, so vividly described, that the reader who 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION, 

seeks merely for entertainment from a novel had best 
not open the covers of " Rhoda Fleming." 

Before taking up " Vittoria " and " Sandra Bel- 
loni " we must mention the fact that George Meredith 
served as correspondent to the London Morning Post 
during the last Austro-Italian war in 1866, when Italy 
obtained her liberty. He did not go forward with the 
army, or see much actual fighting, but at Venice he 
had opportunities of studying the character and situ- 
ations of the opposed forces ; and the result of this 
study he gave to the world in "Vittoria," which was 
written at that time. This book is a series of strong, 
vivid impressions, full of color ; but it is unpruned 
and overloaded with material. Its effect upon the 
reader is like the effect aroused by some great battle- 
scene on canvas ; the artist's perseverance and courage 
in attempting such a colossal piece of work cause us 
to admire him, but we soon tire of gazing at the results 
of his Titanic efforts. 

" Sandra Belloni " and " Vittoria " together form 
one extended recital, and make an exceedingly com- 
plicated organism, which is not easily taken apart ; 
we doubt if any reader ever pushed his way through 
both of them without moments of fatigue. In these 
two volumes the writer follows the fortunes of one 
w^oman, w^ho is a grandly conceived and finely drawn 
study. This woman — Emilia in England, afterwards 
Vittoria in Italy — was the daughter of an uneducated 
Italian living in England ; she was born with a pas- 
sion for music, and gifted with a wonderful voice ; her 



INTRODUCTION, xxxvii 

musical talent led her to be invited to the house of 
a vulgar English family by the name of Pole. They 
are described by the writer as " perpetually mount- 
ing." One of this family, Wilfrid Pole, made love 
to Emilia, but soon gave her up because he dared not 
risk his social position by marrying a woman who had 
neither fortune nor family. The sisters of Wilfrid 
Pole are admirable pen-and-ink sketches ; they sup- 
posed they enjoyed " exclusive possession of the nice 
feelings and fine shades." After Emilia discovered 
her lover's inconstancy she left England to devote 
herself to music and Italy ; under the name of Vit- 
toria she appears again in the second part, acting as 
leader in an Italian political conspiracy ; in the guise 
of a debutante at the opera, she gives the signal for 
revolt by singing a solo with the patriotic refrain 
*' Italia shall be free." This scene, the opening scene 
in "Vittoria," is a grandly dramatic one; it is the 
natural climax of the narrative, and the reader is sadly 
disappointed to find that the succeeding events do not 
grow increasingly interesting ; the plot thickens only 
to grow more involved ; the new threads which are 
introduced are crossed and tangled, and the reader 
grows desperate in attempting to disentangle the final 
snarl. In the midst of all this confusion stands out 
one grand, harmonious conception, — the character of 
Emilia ; she is a heroine in every act of her life, per- 
fectly equal to each emergency, thrilling with feeling, 
and yet controlling her emotion when occasion de- 
mands it for the good of others. She performs star- 



xxxviii INTRODUCTION. 

tling feats of heroism, but the greatest is her supreme 
mastery over herself. Still, with all these high quali- 
ties, there is some slight want in Emilia's nature; she 
is admirable, but not lovable ; she is wonderful, but 
not winning. We do not open our hearts to her as 
we do to some of Meredith's more faulty creations. 
She is perhaps deficient in some subtle human quality, 
and stands like a beautiful statue far apart from life. 

These two novels — " Sandra Belloni " and " Vitto- 
ria" — are striking proofs of the scope of Meredith's 
genius. He does not even confine himself to one 
national type, but has that breadth of insight which 
enables him to comprehend an alien race. His range 
of character is universal. In these two novels and in 
*' The Adventures of Harry Richmond " the writer's 
style is less involved. We are puzzled and confused 
by fewer metaphors, and delighted by fewer epigrams. 
There is an apparent effort made by Meredith, at least 
in Vittoria and in Harry Richmond, to be more simple 
and more conventional. In " Emilia in England " the 
writer gives utterance to his own heretical literary 
creed : " The point to be considered is whether fiction 
demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly 
a scientific work does, and a philosophic treatise 
should. When we ask for facts simply, we feel the 
intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part. In the one 
case the classical robe, in the other any mediaeval 
phantasy of clothing." Again, in this same novel he 
says : "A writer who is not servile, and has insight, 
must coin from his own mint. In prose we owe every- 



INTRODUCTION. xxxix 

thing to the license our poets have taken, in the teeth 
of critics." 

We will not linger with the colossal charlatan, in 
Harry Richmond, save to say that immense imagi- 
native power and a daring intellect were required 
to conceive such a wildly sensational and abso- 
lutely improbable tale. In this book there are few 
sententious sayings ; all the author's energy went 
towards preparing his extraordinary plot, and devel- 
oping and arranging his great heterogeneous army 
of characters. 

"The Egoist," which followed "The Adventures of 
Harry Richmond," is hkewise stamped with Meredith's 
most irritating peculiarities, and is more difficult for 
a beginner to attack than any other of these novels. 
It has a long Prelude, which can be read half a dozen 
times without conveying any intelligible meaning to 
the reader's mind ; indeed, the writer calls it "a chap- 
ter of which the last page only is of any importance." 
It is like a dark, tortuous, subterranean passage, into 
which few rays of light penetrate, serving only to 
make the darkness more palpable ; whether the author 
himself ever comes out anywhere, few of his readers 
will be able to determine. The first part of " The 
Egoist " must be taken on faith, — a faith grounded 
on a knowledge of Meredith's power, gained from 
reading " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel " and 
" Beauchamp's Career " ; but when once interest in 
the fine analysis of Sir Willoughby Pattern's charac- 
ter is aroused, the book will be appreciated. 



xl INTRODUCTION. 

Stevenson has taken " The Egoist " into the circle 
of his intimates, and has read it four or five times. 
One Enghsh critic thinks it the most witty of all 
Meredith's novels ; but an American critic, George 
Parsons Lathrop, calls it "an inflated, obese, ele- 
phantine comedy, which is not comic." Granted that 
it is inflated, obese, extravagant, and coarse, acknowl- 
edging all these faults, we yet claim that it is deli- 
ciously, spontaneously, and irresistibly humorous. Sir 
Willoughby is a type of incarnate selfishness and con- 
ceit. Perhaps no real person ever existed who was 
exactly his prototype, for he combines in his person- 
ality all possible phases of egotism. The consummate 
literary skill of Meredith is displayed in the develop- 
ment of this one thoroughly consistent character : Sir 
Willoughby is great in the way that many of Balzac's 
creations are great, — as a living, breathing embodi- 
ment of one strong characteristic ; and every other 
personage in this novel is subservient to the Egoist. 
There are, however, other excellent character sketches, 
such as Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, who "was a 
lady certain to say the remembered, if not the right 
thing," and had " her decided preference of persons 
that shone m the sun." There, too, is that beguiling 
young woman, Clara Middleton ! We quote the de- 
scription of her: "She was too beautiful. Whatever 
she did was best. That was the refrain of the fountain- 
song in him : the burden being her whims, variations, 
inconsistencies, wiles ; her tremblings between good 
and naughty, that might be stamped to noble or to 



INTRODUCTION. xli 

terrible ; her sincereness, her duplicity, her courage, 
cowardice, possibilities for heroism or treachery. She 
was a creature of only naturally youthful wildness, 
provoked to freakishness by the ordeal of a situation 
shrewd as any that can happen to her sex in civilized 
life." 

The bhndly romantic Letitia Dale is another well- 
defined type in '' The Egoist." In the contrast 
between the self-abnegating young girl longing to 
worship her ideal man, and the disappointed woman 
facing with open eyes her shattered idol, Meredith 
presents us with a great dramatic contrast. Letitia 
illustrates the pernicious consequences of a too blind 
worship of any one of God's creatures ; her poor, 
bleeding heart is opened with a sharp dissecting- 
knife, and we are permitted to gaze upon it as its hfe- 
blood dries up, and it shrivels and withers away before 
our eves. Where has Meredith obtained his knowl- 
edge of women's hearts '^, Nothing that is feminine is 
unknown to him ; but what is to be said about the 
rough surface of " The Egoist " 1 How is the reader 
to overcome his dislike to the fantastic clothing under 
which the writer has chosen to conceal this great com- 
edy ? It can only be accepted as an inflexible char- 
acteristic of Meredith's manner, to be deplored, but 
endured. Just as a beautiful face may be injured by 
one bad feature, but not ruined, so, in considering a 
writer's merits, w^e must not let one prominent and 
aggressive fault deter us from appreciating what is 
truly admirable. 



xlii INTRODUCTION. 

To the general reader, *' Beauchamp's Career " will 
be more interesting than " The Egoist." It is crammed 
with incident, and the hero is the very antithesis of 
Sir Willoughby Pattern. Beauchamp was generous, 
idealistic, honourable, and passionately interested in 
the public weal. He was a man whose projects 
always failed, but whose failures call for more admi- 
ration than the most brilliant successes of others. 
He was a hero, and a hero-worshipper ; yet his life 
was one long succession of mistakes. Beauchamp's 
character is by far the noblest and most lovable of 
all Meredith's masculine creations ; he fought single- 
handed against the w^orld, and fate and circumstances 
were too strong for him ; but he stands out in our 
minds as the ideal youth, alive to all that is good, true, 
or beautiful in life. His only weakness lay in his 
excessive sensibility to the charms of woman. All 
women were adorable to him, and he adored more 
than his share of them. In this work we have a new 
gallery of feminine portraits ; were there ever three 
more charming creations than Renee, Cecilia, and 
Jenny 1 Do we wonder that they all captivated the 
youthful Beauchamp? If we do, we must remember 
Meredith's sage remark, that "men open to passion 
have to be taught reflection before they distinguish 
between the woman they would sue for love because 
she would be their best mate, and the woman who has 
thrown a spell over them." 

Dr. Shrapnel is one of the most striking personages 
in this novel. He is a rabid radical in politics, and 



INTRODUCTION. xliii 

a violent declaimer against the present social condi- 
tions in England. Perhaps in him the writer embod- 
ies many of his own political theories ; for Shrapnel 
is a mouthpiece rather than a personality ; he dogma- 
tizes, philosophizes, and makes vigorous assaults upon 
the church, the clergy, the state, and the upper classes 
of society in Great Britain. Indeed, most of the apho- 
risms, of which there are two or three hundred in this 
novel, treat of political life. Dr. Shrapnel's philoso- 
phy, however, is not always either coherent or consist- 
ent. He strikes right and left, and hits at all existing 
forms of evil ; but, like Carlyle, he contents himself 
with destroying and reviling, and rarely stops to re- 
build. Beauchamp makes an idol of this great Radi- 
cal, and follows him blindly ; and the younger man's 
capacity for hero-worship is a delightful feature in his 
many-sided character. Another delicately conceived 
relationship is the one which existed between Beau- 
champ and Rosamund. The pure yet absorbing love 
of an older woman for a brilliant, noble-minded boy 
has rarely been touched upon before by a novelist. 
The mixture of the maternal in Rosamund's feeling 
for Beauchamp is beautiful, and keeps the relationship 
from the least taint of sensuality or vulgarity ; in 
Beauchamp the lonely woman saw infinite possibili- 
ties, and her love for the divine in him was akin to 
the worship she lifted up to God. 

The subtle psychic forces which unite individuals 
and decide their fates are studied scientifically in all 
Meredith's novels, but the working of these forces 



xliv INTRODUCTION. 

is especially apparent in the book before us. In 
Beauchamp's strong personal influence over all the 
women he came in contact with, we see an illustration 
of the magnetic power of moral beauty. His power of 
attracting and holding love was almost magical. 

Turning over the pages of " Beauchamp's Career" is 
like looking into the glittering show-window of some 
fashionable jeweller ; the array of sparkling gems 
dazzles us, but, to appreciate any one jewel, we must 
detach it from its brilliant company, and let it shine 
in solitary radiance. Every page of this novel is 
crammed with aphorisms, but they so crowd one 
another that no epigram has a chance of being esti- 
mated at its full value. Besides the collection of rare 
*' seed-thoughts " and "gold-dust," which we find scat- 
tered so extravagantly through the pages of " Beau- 
champ's Career," the writer often delights us by 
indulging himself in one of his tender lyrical moods. 
Who, that has read this novel, is likely to forget the 
glorious description of dawn upon the Adriatic .-^ It 
could only have dropped from the pen of a poet. It 
recalls a familiar canto in " Childe Harold," and 
tempts us to compare Meredith with the "noble poet " ; 
for in spite of his contempt for the Byronic in life and 
literature, — which Meredith translates to mean the 
sentimental and insincere, — these two writers cer- 
tainly had points in common ; both were spontaneous, 
and yet both were insensible, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, to artistic form. But while Byron was the 
most subjective of poets, and never looked at the 



INTRO D UC TION. xl v 

world except through his own short-sighted eyes, 
Meredith has a wonderful faculty for getting outside 
himself, and for looking at life without reference to 
its effect upon his own individual career. That un- 
healthy feature of modern literature — the morbid in- 
troduction of the writer's personality into his novels, 
his poems, and even his essays — is a vice from which 
Meredith is absolutely free. He never consciously 
indulges himself in egoism. " Life immense in pas- 
sion, pulse, and power," is so absorbingly interesting 
to him that he cannot afford to turn his back upon 
it and confine his attention within the narrow limits 
of his own Ego. The awe-inspiring spectacle of this 
manifold nineteenth century existence of ours presses 
upon Meredith as it does upon Walt Whitman. Our 
vision of life deepens and widens as we read these re- 
markable novels ; and, forgetful of personal and petty 
woes, we turn with their author to face the facts of this 
universe with courage, hope, and reverence, desiring 
*' to earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres 
and goes forward, and is not dropt by death." 

The last prose publications of Meredith are " The 
Tragic Comedians " and " Diana of the Crossways." 
The former of these was published in the Fortnightly 
Review, in 1880 and 1881. It has never been repub- 
lished in this country, and at the time it was written 
involved the writer unjustly in a serious charge of 
plagiarism. It is said to be the true story of Fer- 
dinand Lassalle's life. It has more unity, and is 
condensed into a more compact form, than most of 



xlvi INTRODUCTION, 

Meredith's books ; but here also the style is uncouth 
and the sentences are obscure and enigmatical. In 
*' The Tragic Comedians " the writer gives much time 
and strength to moralizing and philosophizing, yet 
few of his reflections take form enough to be called 
aphorisms. His wit and wisdom in this story are like 
the delicate spring wild-flowers, beautiful amid their 
natural surrounding, but losing all strength and fra- 
grance in the process of transplanting. The author's 
strange Preface to this book, in explanation of its 
eccentric title, is worth examination. Of his hero he 
writes : " He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to 
be adored ; his last temptation caught him in the 
season before he had subdued his blood, and amid 
the multitudinously simple of the world stamped him 
as a tragic comedian ; that is, a grand pretender, a self- 
deceiver, one of the lively ludicrous, whom we cannot 
laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where 
their character strikes the note of discord with life ; 
for otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life 
will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to 
antic and dive into gulfs. The characters of the 
hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic; 
not many are of a stature and a complexity calling 
for the junction of the two Muses to name them." In 
this prolix passage Meredith is shown at his worst ; 
he can spin out this sort of brain-stuff by the chapter, 
and has not enough literary tact to appreciate the fact 
that the public will not give ear to such vagaries, even 
though they be the vagaries of genius. 



INTRODUCTION. xlvii 

Last of all, we take up what has proved to be the 
most popular of all Meredith's novels. " Diana of the 
Crossways " is a story of the adventures and misad- 
ventures of a fashionable and witty society woman. 
The writer gives Diana beauty of body, brilliancy of 
mind, and all the lovable feminine qualities; she had 
an intellect which for keenness and versatility was 
far beyond the average masculine intellect. Wherever 
the perceptive power of the intellect led, she ruled 
supreme ; but her " sense was with her senses all 
mixed up," and in every crisis of life she permitted 
herself to be ruled by her feelings. She relied for 
guidance chiefly upon her instincts, and not upon 
her reason, and had never disciplined her emotional 
nature to obey the dictates of hard common-sense. 
This fatal defect in the mental machinery of all wo- 
men, Meredith sees and deplores. He never under- 
estimates the capacity of the feminine mind; he 
delights in its playful antics, its delicate subtleties, 
and its quick sensitiveness to shades of thought and 
feeling ; but the supreme faculty of reason, the high- 
est, in Meredith's opinion, of all faculties, he finds as 
yet undeveloped in the weaker sex. The heart with 
them always '^overrules the head"; their intellects, no 
matter how brilliant they may be, never forewarn them 
of danger, never control their actions in the crucial 
events of their lives. All the mistakes made by the 
fascinating Diana, in the book before us, are concrete 
illustrations of this theory. Women, according to 
Meredith's avowed theory, are volatile, inconsequent 



xlviii INTRO D UCTION. 

creatures, the slaves of every fleeting impulse ; they 
may be clever in conversation, they may think deeply 
on abstract questions, but their lives are utterly incon- 
sistent, and no one can ever tell what extraordinary, 
irrevocable mischief they may perpetrate at any mo- 
ment. In Diana's betrayal of her lover's state secret, 
this theory is illustrated with great force ; and not alone 
in this flagrant act, but in all Diana's life, do we see the 
writer's conception of " a woman's reason " disclosed. 
The cleverness of the " table-talk " in " Diana of the 
Crossways " is very remarkable ; the conversations in 
this novel are worthy to be compared for brilliancy 
with any which took place in the salons of the Ram- 
bouillet before the society of the Precieuses degener- 
ated and became ridiculous. There may be a differ- 
ence of opinion about this book considered as a novel. 
It does not sufficiently conform to all the rules of art 
to be approved by critics of the highest standard ; but 
there can be no divergence of taste as to the merits 
of its clever dialogues, and the wit of its many incisive 
idiomatic epigrams. 

By close attention to the rules of narrative, to what 
Besant calls "the art of fiction," many a writer can 
produce novels which will have fewer faults in con- 
struction than George Meredith's ; but there is a gift 
of the Gods, a clairvoyance, never attained by any 
amount of perseverance, which is the dower of great 
minds, among whom we must class George Meredith. 
Nothing is easier than to point out Meredith's faults. 
They force themselves upon us at every step we 



INTRODUCTION. xlix 

take within his literary territory. Nor are they subtle 
faults, which require a fine critical eye to discern 
them ; they annoy us like the inevitable thorns 
on a moss-rose bud ; they often bar our progress 
through his novels like the points on a barbed-wire 
fence. But why should we undertake the enumera- 
tion of these defects ? It is a vain and ungrateful 
task ; and the object of this little volume is to lead 
readers to pursue a totally different method of criti- 
cism. We have endeavoured to select from twelve 
volumes of prose and three of verse the best that 
Meredith has said and sung, for the purpose of gain- 
ing for him at least a sym.pathetic hearing. With this 
end in view, we have chosen and collected aphorisms 
long and short, witty epigrams, idiomatic phrases, and 
philosophical reflections upon life ; and we have added 
a few exquisite lyrical prose passages, and several 
entire poems, making an effort to ignore the obscure 
and abstruse, and to present the public with only what 
will be intelligible and attractive at the first reading. 

To those who already revere Meredith, and count 
his books among their familiar friends, this compila- 
tion will seem a needless task. They love him and 
his work too sincerely to be ever satisfied with frag- 
mentary excerpts ; but the compiler who gains new 
readers for a great writer, who opens up to any reader 
a new mine of intellectual treasure, is perhaps of 
some slight service to the literary world. It is to 
those, therefore, who have never dared to go beyond 
the incomprehensible Preface to "The Egoist," who 

d 



1 INTRODUCTION. 

have been provoked to wrath by the first pages of 
" Diana of the Crossways," who have stumbled over 
the halting stanzas of " Grandfather Bridgeman," that 
this small volume of excerpts is dedicated. 

Matthew Arnold tells us that the best tribute we 
can pay an author is, not to cover him with eloquent 
eulogy, but to let him, at his best and greatest, speak 
for himself ; and it is in the hope of gaining for tliis 
great philosophical novelist such an opportunity, that 
these selections from his works have been made. 

It is surely with a lofty conception of his high voca- 
tion, and with true humility, that the poet Meredith 
sings : — 

" Assured of worthiness, we do not dread 
Competitors ; we rather give them hail 
And greeting in the lists where we may fail ; 
Must if we bear an aim beyond the head ! 
My betters are my masters ; purely fed, 
By their sustainment I likewise shall scale 
Some rocky steps between the mount and vale ; 
Meantime the mark I have and I will wed, 
So that I draw the breath of finer air, 
Station is naught, nor footways laurel-strewn, 
My rivals tightly belted for the race 
Good speed to them ! My place is here or there ; 
My pride is that among them I have place ; 
And thus I keep this instrument in tune." 

M R. F. OILMAN. 
Concord, N. H., September i, 1888. 



THE 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 



THE 

ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL 



Love is the blessed wand which wins the waters 
from the hardness of the heart. 



The bom preacher we feel instinctively to be 
our foe. He may do some good to the wretches 
who have been struck down and lie gasping on 
the battle-field : he rouses antagonism in the 
strong. 

If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one 
human being might almost impersonate Providence 
to another. Alas ! love, divine as it is, can do no 
more than lighten the house it inhabits ; must take 
its shape, sometimes intensify its narrowness ; can 
spiritualize, but not expel, the old life-long lodgers 
above stairs and below. 



lo ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 



Consider the sort of minds influenced by set 
sayings. K proverb is the half-way house to an 
idea, I conceive, and the majority rest there con- 
tent : can the keeper of such a house be flattered 
by his company? 

Where is the fortress that has not one weak 
gate ? Where the man who is sound at each par- 
ticular angle ? Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, 
more or less mad is not every mother's son? 
Favorable circumstances, good air, good company, 
two or three rules rigidly adhered to, keep the 
world out of Bedlam. But let the world fly into 
a passion, and is not Bedlam the safest abode 
for it? 

To talk nonsense or poetry, or the dash between 
the two, in a tone of profound sincerity, and to 
enunciate solemn discordances with received opin- 
ion so seriously as to convey the impression of a 
spiritual insight, is the peculiar gift by which mono- 
maniacs, having first persuaded themselves, con- 
trive to influence their neighbors, and through 
them make conquest of a good half of the world 
for good or for ill. 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. il 

Poetry, love, and such-like are the drugs earth 
has to offer to high natures, as she offers to low 
ones debauchery. 

When Nature has made us ripe for love, it sel- 
dom occurs that the Fates are behindhand in fur- 
nishing a temple for the flame. 



Sir Austin and Mrs. Caroline discovered that 
they had in common from an early period looked 
on life as a science ; and having arrived at this 
joint understanding, they, with the indifference of 
practised dissectors, laid out the world and applied 
the knife to the people they knew. In other 
words, they talked most frightful scandal. 



Because the heavens are certainly propitious to 
true lovers, the beasts of the abysses are banded 
to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable sad 
victories ; and every love-tale is an epic war 
of the upper and lower powers. 



With the onward flow of intimacy the two 
happy lovers ceased to be so shy of common 
themes, and their speech did not reject all as 
dross that was not pure gold of emotion. 



12 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVERED 

At their tryst in the wood abutting on Raynham 
Park, wrapped in themselves, piped to by tireless 
love, Richard and Lucy sat toying with eternal 
moments. How they seem as if they would never 
end ! What mere sparks they are when they have 
died out ! And how in the distance of time they 
revive and extend and glow, and make us think 
them full the half, and the best, of the fire of 
our lives ! 



To anchor the heart by any object ere we have 
half traversed the world, is youth's foolishness. 



Love of any human object is the soul's ordeal. 

There are ideas language is too gross for, and 
shape too arbitrary, which come to us and have a 
definite influence upon us ; and yet we cannot fasten 
on the filmy things and make them visible and dis- 
tinct to ourselves, m.uch less to others. 



Know you those wand-Hke touches of I know 
not what, before which our grosser being melts, and 
we, much as we hope to be in the Awakening, stand 
etherealized, trembling with new joy? They come 
but rarely, — rarely even in love, when we fondly 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 13 

think them revelations. Mere sensations they are, 
doubtless ; and we can rank for them no higher in 
the spiritual scale than so many translucent glorious 
polypi that quiver on the shores, the hues of heaven 
running through them. Yet in the harvest of our 
days it is something for the animal to have had 
such mere fleshly polypian experiences to look 
back upon, and they give him an horizon, — pale 
seas of luring splendor. 

" Let us remember, " says the Pilgrim's Scrip, 
"that Nature, though heathenish, reaches at her 
best to the footstool of the Highest. She is not 
all dust, but a living portion of the spheres. In 
aspiration it is our error to despise her, forgetting 
that through Nature only can we ascend. " 



Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy 
without incurring the immense debtorship for a 
thing done. 

A POOR dyspepsy may talk as he will, but he is 
the one who never gets sympathy, or experiences 
compassion ; and it is he whose groaning petitions 
for charity do at last rout that Christian virtue. 



14 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

Sir Austin had also small patience for his 
brother's gleam of health, which was just enough 
to make his disease visible. 



They say that when the skill and care of men 
rescue a drowned wretch from extinction and 
warm the flickering spirit into steady flame, such 
pain it is, the blood forcing its way along the dry 
channels and the heavily ticking nervxs and the 
sullen heart ; the struggle of Life and Death in 
him ; grim Death relaxing his gripe, — such pain 
it is, he cries out no thanks to them that pull him 
by inches from the depths of the dead river. And 
he who has thought a love extinct, and is surprised 
by the old fires and the old tyranny, — he rebels, 
and strives to fight clear of the cloud of forgotten 
sensations that settle on him ; such pain it is, the 
old, sweet music reviving through his frame, and 
the charm of his passion fixing him afresh. 



There is a power in their troubled beauty women 
learn the use of; and what wonder? They have 
seen it kindle Ilium to flames so often ! But 
ere they grow matronly in the house of Menelaus 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 15 

they weep and implore, and do not in truth know 
how terribly two-edged is their gift of loveliness. 
Love the charioteer is easily tripped ; while honest 
jog-trot Love keeps his legs to the end. 



Her conduct drove Mrs. Berry from the rosy to 
the autumnal view of matrimony, — generally her- 
alded by the announcement that it is a lottery. 



Although it blew hard when Caesar crossed the 
Rubicon, the passage of that river is commonly 
calm, — calm as Acheron. So long as he gets his 
fare, the ferryman does not need to be told whom 
he carries ; he pulls with a will, and heroes may be 
over in half an hour. Only when they stand on 
the opposite bank do they see what a leap they 
have taken ; the shores they have relinquished 
shrink to an infinite remoteness. There they have 
dreamed ; here they must act. There He youth 
and irresolution ; here manhood and purpose. 
They are veritably in another land ; a moral Ach- 
eron divides their life. Their memories scarce 
seem their own. 



1 6 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 

The " Philosophical Geography " about to be 
published observes that each man has, one time or 
other, a little Rubicon — a clear or a foul water — to 
cross. It is asked him, " Wilt thou wed this Fate, 
and give up all behind thee ? " And " I will," firmly 
pronounced, speeds him over. The above-named 
manuscript authority informs us that by far the 
greater number of carcases rolled by this heroic 
flood to its sister stream below are those of fellows 
who have repented their pledge and have tried to 
swim back to the bank they have blotted out. For 
though every man of us may be a hero for one 
fatal minute, very few remain so after a day's 
march even ; and who wonders that Madame Fate 
is indignant, and wears the features of the terrible 
universal Fate to him? 



The danger of a little knowledge of things is 
disputable ; but beware the little knowledge of 
one's self. 



It is difficult for those who think very earnestly 
for their children to know when their children are 
thinking on their own account. The exercise of 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 17 

their volition we construe for revolt. Our love does 
not like to be invalided and deposed from its 
command ; and here I think yonder old thrush on 
the lawn, who has just kicked the last of her lank 
offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, much 
the kinder of the two, though sentimental people 
do shrug their shoulders at these unsentimental 
acts of the creatures who wander from Nature. 



The reason why men and women are mysterious 
to us, and prove disappointing, is that we will read 
them from our own book, just as we are perplexed 
by reading ourselves from theirs. 



Each woman is Eve throughout the ages ; where- 
as the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam 
in men has become warier, if not wiser, and, weak 
as he is, has learned a lesson from time. Probably 
the Pilgrim's meaning may be taken to be that man 
grows, and woman does not. 



The Pilgrim may be wrong about the sex not 
growing ; but its fashion of conducting warfare we 
must allow to be barbarous, and according to what 
is deemed the pristine, or wildcat, method. 



^'n. 



1 8 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL, 

When a soft woman, and that soft woman a 
sinner, is matched with a woman of energy, she 
does not show much fight, and she meets no 
mercy. 

The honeymoon was shining placidly above 
them. Is not happiness like another circulating 
medium ? When we have a very great deal of it, 
some poor hearts are aching for what is taken away 
from them. When we have gone out and seized 
it on the highways, certain inscrutable laws are 
sure to be at work to bring us to the criminal bar 
sooner or later. Who knows the honeymoon that 
did not steal somebody's sweetness? 



The God of this world is in the machine, not 
out of it. 



How are we to know when v/e are at the head 
and fountain of the fates of them we love? 



There are hours when the clearest soul becomes 
a cunning fox. 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 19 

Sir Austin had a weak digestion for wrath. 
Instead of eating it, it ate him. The wild beast 
was not the less deadly because it did not roar, 
and the devil in him not the less active because 
he resolved to do nothing. 



From that moment she grew critical of him, 
and began to study her idol, — a process danger- 
ous to idols. 

Speech is the small change of silence. 



The honeymoon is Mahomet's minute, — or say 
the Persian king's water-pail that you read of in 
the story. You dip your head in it, and when you 
draw it out you discover you have lived a life. 

The small debate in the baronet's mind ended 
by his throwing the burden on Time, — Time would 
bring the matter about. Christians as well as 
pagans are in the habit of phrasing this excuse for 
folding their arms, forgetful that the Devil's imps 
enter into no such armistice. 



20 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

The language of the two social extremes is 
similar. I find it to consist in an instinctively 
lavish use of vowels and adjectives. My Lord and 
Farmer Blaize speak the same tongue, only my 
Lord's has lost its backbone, and is hmp, though 
fluent. Their pursuits are identical, but that one has 
money, or, as the Pilgrim terms it, vantage, and the 
other has not. Their ideas seem to have a special 
relationship in the peculiarity of stopping where 
they have begun. . . . This sounds dreadfully dem- 
ocratic. Pray don't be alarmed. The discovery 
of the affinity between the two extremes of the 
Royal British Oak has made me thrice Conserv- 
ative. I see now that the national love of a lord 
is less subservience than a form of self-love, — 
putting a gold-lace hat on one's image, as it were, 
to bow to it. I see, too, the admirable wisdom 
of our system : could there be a finer balance of 
power than in a community where men intellect- 
ually nil have lawful vantage and a gold-lace hat 
on? How soothing it is to intellect — that noble 
rebel, as the Pilgrim has it — to stand and bow 
and know itself superior ! This exquisite compen- 
sation maintains the balance ; whereas that period 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 21 

anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have 
produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed hor- 
rible to contemplate. For what despotism is so 
black as one the mind cannot challenge ? 



But to be passive in calamity is the province of 
no woman. Mark the race at any hour. What 
revolution and hubbub does not that little instru- 
ment, the needle, avert from us ! 



Young men take joy in nothing so much as the 
thinking women angels ; and nothing sours men 
of experience more than knowing that all are 
not quite so. 

His indigestion of wrath had made of him a 
moral dyspepsy. 

''Laugh away," said Mrs. Berry; ''I don't mind 
ye. I say again, we all do know what checked 
prespiration is. It fly to the lungs, it gives ye 
mortal inflammation, and it carries ye off. Then 
I say checked matrimony is as bad. It fly to the 
heart, and it carries oif the virtue that 's in ye, and 
you might as well be dead ! Them that is joined, 



2 2 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

it 's their salvation not to separate ! It don't so 
much matter before it. That Mr. Thompson there, 
— if he go astray it ain't from the blessed fold. 
He hurt himself alone. . . . I 'm for holding back 
young people so that they knows their minds, 
howsomever they rattles about their hearts. I ain't 
a speeder of matrimony, and good 's my reason ! 
But where it 's been done, where they 're lawfully 
joined and their bodies made one, I do say this : 
that to put division between 'em then, it 's to make 
wanderin' comets of 'em, — creatures without a 
objeck ; and no soul can say what they 's good for 
but to rush about ! " 



In love, Mrs. Berry's charity was all on the side 
of the law, — and this is the case with many of her 
sisters. 

She could read men with one quiver of her 
half-closed eyelashes. She could catch the com- 
ing mood of a man and fit herself to it. What 
does a woman want with ideas who can do this? 
Keenness of perception, conformity, delicacy of 
handling, these be all the qualities necessary to 
parasites. . . . Various as the serpent of old Nile, 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVERED 23 

she acted fallen beauty, humorous indifference, 
reckless daring, arrogance in ruin. 



What she liked him for, she rather (very 
slightly) wished to do away with, or see if it 
could be done away with, — just as one wishes to 
catch a pretty butterfly without hurting its pat- 
terned wings. No harm intended to the innocent 
insect, only one wants to inspect it thoroughly 
and enjoy the marvel of it, in one's tender pos- 
session, and have the felicity of thinking one 
could crush it if one would. 



Heroes, however, are not in the habit of wording 
their declarations of war at all. Lance in rest, they 
challenge and they charge. Like women, they 
trust to instinct, and graft on it the muscle of men. 
Wide fly the leisurely remonstrating hosts ; insti- 
tutions are scattered, they know not wherefore ; 
heads are broken that have not the balm of a 
reason why. 'T is instinct strikes. Surely there is 
something divine in instinct ! 



She told him stories of blooming dames of 
good repute, and poured a little social sewerage 
into his ears. 



24 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 

There is something impressive in a great human 
hulk writhing under the unutterable torments of 
a mastery he cannot contend with, or account for, 
or explain by means of intelligible words. 



The heroine, in common with the hero, has her 
ambition to be of use in the world, — to do some 
good ; and the task of reclaiming a bad man is 
extremely seductive to good women. Dear to 
their tender hearts as old china is a bad man they 
are mending. 



The Aphorist read himself so well that to 
juggle with himself was a necessity. As he wished 
the world to see him, he beheld himself : one who 
entirely put aside mere personal feelings ; one in 
whom parental duty, based on the science of life, 
was paramount, — a scientific humanist, in short. 



His was an order of mind that would accept 
the most burdensome charges, and by some species 
of moral usury make a profit out of them. 



" One gets so addle-pated thinkin' many things," 
said Mrs. Berry, simply ; ^^that 's why we see v/on- 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL, 25 

der clever people al'ays goin' wrong — to my mind. 
I think it 's al'ays the plan in a dielemmer to 
pray God and walk forward." 



" Believin' our idees o' matrimony to be sim'lar, 
then I '11 say, once married, married for life ! Yes ! 
I don't even like widows. For I can't stop at 
the grave, not at the tomb I can't stop. My 
husband 's my husband, and if I 'm a body at the 
resurrection, I say, speaking humbly, my Berry is 
the husband o' my body; and to think of two 
claimin' of me, — it makes me hot all over ! Such 
is my notion of that state between man and 
woman. No givin' in marriage o' course, I know, 
and if so, I 'm single. '* 



Richard is face to face with death for the first 
time. He sees the sculpture of clay, — the spark 
is gone. 

Character ! he has the character of a bullet 
with a treble charge of powder behind it. Enthu- 
siasm ■ is the powder. That boy could get up an 
enthusiasm for the maiden days of Ops. 



2 6 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 

Sextlmextal people are sure to live long and 
die fat. 'T is feeling that 's the slayer. Senti- 
ment ! 't is the cajolery of existence, the soft 
bloom which whoso weareth, he or she is enviable. 



'' He 's off in his heroics, " said Mrs. Berry ; '^ he 
want to be doin' all sorts of thinsfs : I sav he '11 
never do anything grander than that baby. " 



The phantasmic groupings of the young brain 
are very like those we see in the skies, and equally 
the sport of the wind. 



Noxsense of enthusiasts is very different from 
nonsense of ninnies. 



A MAKER of proverbs, — vrhat is he but a narrow 
mind, the mouthpiece of narrower? 



Which is the coward among us? He who sneers 



at the failings of humanity. 



The autumn-primrose blooms for the loftiest 
manhood ; is a vindictive flower in lesser hands. 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL. 27 



Beauty of course is for the hero. Nevertheless, 
it is not ahvays he on whom Beauty works its 
most conquering influence. It is the dull, com- 
monplace man, into whose slow brain she drops 
like a celestial Hght, and burns lastingly. The poet, 
for instance, is a connoisseur of Beauty; to the 
artist she is the model. These gendemen, by 
much contemplation of her charms, wax critical. 
The days when they had hearts being gone, they 
are haply divided between the blonde and the 
brunette; the aquiline nose and the Proserpine; 
this shaped eye and that. But go about among 
simple, unprofessional fellows, boors, dunderheads, 
and here and there you shall find some barbarous 
intelligence which has had just strength enough 
to conceive and has taken Beauty as its goddess, 
and knows but one form to worship in its poor, 
stupid fashion, and would perish for her. Nay, 
more, the man would devote all his day to her, 
though he is dumb as a dog. And, indeed, he is 
Beauty's dog. Almost every Beauty has her dog. 
The hero possesses her ; the poet proclaims her ; 
the painter puts her upon canvas ; and the faithful 
old dog follows her ; and the end of it is that the 



28 ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL. 

faithful old dog is her single attendant. Sir Hero 
is revelling in the wars or in Armida's bowers ; 
Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle ; the brush is for the 
rose in its season. She turns to her old dog then ; 
she hugs him ; and he who has subsisted on a 
bone and a pat till there he squats decrepid, he 
turns his grateful old eye up to her, and has not 
a notion she is hugging sad memories in him, 
Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one ! Then 
is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, 
and there is a paragraph in the newspapers con- 
cerning the extraordinary fidelity of an old dog. 



Let it be some apology for the damage caused 
by the careering hero, and a consolation to the 
quiet wretches dragged along with him at his 
chariot-wheels, that he is generally the last to 
know when he has made an actual start, — such a 
mere creature is he, like the rest of us, albeit the 
head of our fates. By this you perceive the true 
hero, whether he be a prince or a pot-boy, that he 
does not plot ; Fortune does all for him. He 
may be compared to one to whom, in an electric 
circle, it is given" to carry the battery. We 



ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVER EL, 29 

caper and grimace at his wilj; yet not his the 
will, not his the power. 'T is all Fortune's, whose 
puppet he is. She deals her dispensations through 
him. Yea, though our capers be never so comical, 
he laughs not. Intent upon his own business, the 
true hero asks little services of us here and there ; 
thinks it quite natural they should be acceded to, 
and sees nothing ridiculous in the lamentable con- 
tortions we must go through to fulfil them. Prob- 
ably he is the elect of Fortune because of that 
notable faculty of being intent on his own business. 



There was no middle course for Richard's com- 
rades between high friendship and absolute slav- 
ery. He was deficient in those cosmopolite habits 
and feelings which enable boys and men to hold 
together without caring much for each other ; and, 
like every insulated mortal, he attributed the defi- 
ciency, of which he was quite aware, to the fact of 
possessing a superior nature. 



There is no more grievous sight, as there is no 
greater perversion, than a wise man at the mercy of 
his feelings. 



EVAN HARRINGTON. 



EVAN HARRINGTON, 



A YOUTH who is engaged in the occupation 
of eating his heart, cannot shine to advantage, 
and is as much a burden to himself as he is 
an enigma to others. 



Speech that has to be hauled from the depths 
usually betrays the effort. 



Most youths are like Pope's women, — they have 
no character at all. And indeed a character that 
does not wait for circumstances to shape it, is of 
small worth in the race that must be run. To 
be set too early, is to take the work out of the 
hands of the Sculptor who fashions men. 



Pride was the one developed faculty of Evan's 
nature. The Fates who mould us always work 
from the mainspring. 

3 



34 EVAN HARRINGTON. 

AVe are now and then above our own actions, 
seldom on a level with them. 



Money is the clothing of a gentleman ; he may 
wear it well or ill. Some, you will mark, carry 
great quantities of it gracefully; some, with a 
stinted supply, present a decent appearance ; very 
few, I imagine, will bear inspection who are abso- 
lutely stripped of it. 



Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in 
what he does. And happily so ; for in life he 
subjugates us, and he makes us bondsmen to 
his ashes. 

A purpose w^edded to plans may easily suffer 
shipwreck ; but an unfettered purpose, that moulds 
circumstances as they rise, masters us, and is 
terrible. Character melts to it, like metal in 
the steady furnace. 



The projector of plots is but a miserable gam- 
bler and votary of chances. Of a far higher 
quality is the will that can subdue itself to wait, 
and lay no petty traps for opportunity. 



EVAN HARRINGTON. 35 



There is that in the aspect of a fine frame 
breathing hard facts which, to a youth who has 
been tumbled headlong from his card-castles and 
airy fabrics, is masterful, and like the pressure of 
a Fate. 

Women, who are almost as deeply bound to 
habit as old gentlemen, possess more of its spirit- 
ual element, and are warned by dreams, omens, 
creepings of the flesh, unwonted chills, suicide of 
china, and other shadowing signs, when a break is 
to be anticipated or has occurred. 

A MERCURIAL temperament makes quicksilver of 
any amount of cash. 

A MISERY beyond our own is a wholesome pic- 
ture for youth ; and though we may not for the 
moment compare the deep with the lower deep, 
we, if we have a heart for outer sorrows, can 
forget ourselves in it. 

Both Ale and Eve seem to speak imperiously 
to the soul of man. See that they be good, see 
that they come in season, and we bow to the 
consequences. 



36 EVAN HARRINGTON, 

There is danger, when you are forcing a merry 
countenance before the mirror presented to you by 
your kind, that your features, unless severely prac- 
tised, will enlarge beyond the artistic hmits, and 
degenerate to a grimace. 



We mortals, the best of us, may be silly sheep 
in our likes and dislikes : where there is no pre- 
meditated or instinctive antagonism, we can be led 
into warm acknowledgment of merits we have not 
sounded, 

V/e return to our first ambitions as to our first 
loves ; not that they are dearer to us, — quit that 
delusion ; our ripened loves and mature ambitions 
are probably closest to our hearts, as they deserve 
to be : but we return to them because our youth 
has a hold on us which it asserts whenever a dis- 
appointment knocks us down. Our old loves are 
always lurking to avenge themselves on the new by 
tempting us to a little retrograde infidelity. 



Note that in all material fashions, as in all 
moral obsen^ances, women demand a circum- 
ference, and enlarge it more and more as civi- 



EVAN HARRINGTON. 37 

lization advances. Respect the mighty instinct, 
however mysterious it seem. 



Our comedies are frequently youth's tragedies. 

Let a girl talk with her own heart an hour, and 
she is almost a wom.an. 



Touching a nerve is one of those unforgivable 
small offences which in our civilized state pro- 
duce the social vendettas and dramas that, with 
savage nations, spring from the spilling of blood. 
Instead of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, 
we demand a nerve for a nerve. ^^Thou hast 
touched me where I am tender : thee too will 
I touch." 

Every dinner may be said to have its special 
topic, just as every age has its marked reputation. 
They are put up twice or thrice, and have to 
contend with minor lights and to swallow them ; 
and then they command the tongues of men, and 
flow uninterruptedly. 



Love m.ay spring in the bosom of a young girl 
like Hesper in the evening sky, — a gray speck in 



38 EVAN HARRINGTON. 

a field of gray, and not to be seen or known ; 
till surely, as the circle advances, the faint planet 
gathers fire, and, coming nearer earth, dilates, 
and will and must be seen and known. 



There is mob-rule in minds as in communities. 



Mrs. Melville was a specimen of the arrant 
British wife, — inflexible in her own virtue, and 
never certain of her husband's when he was out 
of sight ; a noble being, but somewhat wanting in 
confidence and Christianity. 



That small motives are at the bottom of many 
illustrious actions, is a modem discovery. 



Now the sense of honour, and of the necessity 
of acting the part it imposes on him, may be very 
strong in a young man ; but certainly the sense of 
ridicule is more poignant. 



It is no insignificant contest when love has to 
crush self-love utterly. At moments it can be 
done. Love has divine moments. There are 



EVAN HARRINGTON. 39 

times also when Love draws part of his being from 
self-love, and can find no support without it. 



If it be a distinct point of wisdom to hug the 
hour that is, then does dinner amount to a highly 
intellectual invitation to man, for it furnishes the 
occasion ; and Britons are the wisest of their race, 
for more than all others they take advantage of 
it. In this. Nature is undoubtedly our guide, seeing 
that he who, while feasting his body, allows to his 
soul a thought for the morrow, is in his digestion 
cursed, and becomes a house of evil humors. Now, 
though the epicure may complain of the cold 
meats, a dazzling table, a buzzing company, blue 
sky, and a band of music are incentives to the 
forgetfulness of troubles past and imminent, and 
produce a concentration of the faculties. 



In this struggle with society I see one of the 
instances where success is entirely to be honoured, 
and remains a proof of merit. For however boldly 
antagonism may storm the ranks of society, it will 
certainly be repelled, whereas affinity cannot be 
resisted ; and they who, against obstacles of birth, 



40 EVAN HARRINGTOX. 

claim and keep their position among the educated 
and refined have that affinity. 



Do not despise a virtue purely Pagan ! The 
young who can act readily up to the Christian Hght 
are happier, doubtless, but they are led, they are 
passive ; I think they do not make such capital 
Christians subsequently. They are never in such 
danger, we know ; but some in the flock are more 
than sheep. The heathen ideal it is not so very 
easy to attain ; and those who mount from it to the 
Christian have, in my humble thought, a firmer 
footing. 

When love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the 
opiate. 

After a big blow, a very little one scarcely 
counts. What are outward forms and social igno- 
minies to him whose heart has been stmck to the 
dust? 

It is false to imagine that schemers and workers 
in the dark are destitute of the saving gift of con- 
science. They have it, and it is perhaps made 



EVAN HARRINGTOIV. 41 

livelier in them than with easy people ; and there- 
fore they are imperatively spurred to hoodwink it. 
Hence their self-delusion is deep, and endures. 
They march to their object, and, gaining or losing 
it, the voice that calls to them is the voice of a 
blind creature, whom any answer, provided the 
answer is ready, will satisfy. . . . When finally they 
snatch their minute of sight on the threshold of 
black night, their souls may compare with yonder 
shining circle on the ceiling, which, as the night-light 
below gasps for air, contracts, and extends but to 
mingle with the darkness. They would be nobler, 
better, boundlessly good to all, — to those whom they 
have injured. Alas ! for any definite deed, the limit 
of their circle is imm.ovable, and they must act 
within it. The trick they have played themselves 
imprisons them. 



SANDRA BELLONI. 



SANDRA BELLONI. 



It is still a good way from the head of the tallest 
man to the stars. 

Sentimentalists are a perfectly natural growth 
of a fat soil. Wealthy communities must engender 
them. If with attentive minds we mark the origin 
of classes, we shall discern that the nice feelings 
and the fine shades play a principal part in our 
human development and social history. I dare 
hot say that civilized man is to be studied with the 
eye of a naturalist ; but my vulgar meaning might 
almost be twisted to convey that our sentimentalists 
are a variety owing their existence to a certain pro- 
longed term of comfortable feeling. The pig, it 
will be retorted, passes likewise through this train- 
ing. He does. But in him it is not combined 
with an indigestion of High-German romances. 



46 SANDRA BELLONI. 

Here is so notable a difference tliat he cannot 
possibly be said to be of the family. And I main- 
tain it against him, who have nevertheless listened 
attentively to the eulogies pronounced by the 
venders of prize bacon. 



Women cannot repose on a man who is not 
positive ; nor have they much gratification in con- 
founding him. Wouldst thou, O man amorously 
inclining, attract to thee superior women, be posi- 
tive, be stupidly positive, rather than dubious at 
all. Face fearful questions with a visor of brass. 
Array thyself in dogmas. Show thy decisive judg- 
ment on the side of established power, or thy 
enthusiasm in the rebel ranks, if it must be so ; but 
be firm. Waver not. If women could tolerate 
waverings and weakness, and did not rush to the 
adoration of decision of mind, we should not be- 
hold them turning contemptuously from philoso- 
phers in their agony to take refuge in smirking 
orthodoxy. 

The parasite completes the animal, and a de- 
pendant assures us of our position. 



SANDRA BELLOiVI. 47 

The philosopher bids us mark that the crown 
and flower of the nervous system, the head, is 
necessarily sensitive, and to that degree that what- 
soever we place on it does for a certain period 
change and shape us. Of course the instant we 
call up the forces of the brain much of the im- 
pression departs ; but what remains is powerful 
and fine-nerved. Woman is especially subject to 
it. A girl may put on her brother's boots, and they 
will not affect her spirit strongly ; but as soon as she 
puts on her brother's hat, she gives him a manly 
nod. The same philosopher, who father^ his dul- 
ness on me, asserts that the modern vice of fastness 
(trotting on '' the Epicene Border "he has it) is bred 
by apparently harmless practices of this description. 
He offers to turn the current of a republican's 
brain by resting a coronet on his forehead for just 
five seconds. 



When the youth is called upon to look up, he 
can adore devoutly and ardently ; but when it is 
his chance to look down on a fair head, he is, if 
not worse, a sentimental despot. 



48 SANDRA BELLONI. 



Selection can only be made from a crowd. It 
is where we see few that we are at the mercy of 
kind fortune for our acquaintances. 

When we say we know any one, we mean com- 
monly that we are accustomed to his ways and 
habits of mind, or that we can reckon on the 
predominant influences of his appetites. Some- 
times we can tell which impulse is likely to be the 
most active, and which principle the least restrain- 
ing. The only knowledge to be trusted is a 
grounded.- or scientific study of the springs that 
move him, side by side with his method of moving 
the springs. 

Highly civilized natures do sometimes, and keen 
wits must always, feel dissatisfied when they are 
not on the laughing side ; their dread of laughter 
is an instinctive respect for it. 

No ridicule knocks the strength out of us so 
thoroughly as our own. 

Just as children will pinch themselves, pleased, 
up to the verge of unendurable pain, so do senti- 



SANDRA BELLONL 49 

mentalists find a keen relish in performing secret 
penance for self-accused offences. Thus they 
become righteous to their own hearts, and evade, 
as they hope, the public scourge. 



Little people think either what they are made 
to think, or what they choose to think ; and the 
education of girls is to make them believe that 
facts are their enemies. 



She [Cornelia] affected in her restlessness to 
think that her spirits required an intellectual seda- 
tive ; so she went to the library for a book, where 
she skimmed many, — a fashion that may be recom- 
mended for assisting us to a sense of sovereign 
superiority to authors, and also of serene contempt 
for all mental difficulties. 



A HAPPY audacity of expression may pass. It is 

bad taste to repeat it. 



In love we have some idea whither we would go ; 
in harness we are simply driven, and the destination 
may be anywhere. 

4 



50 SANDRA BELLONL 

All of us are weak in the period of growth, and 
are of small worth before the hour of trial. This 
fellow had been fattening all his life on prosperity, 
— the very best dish in the world ; but it does not 
prove us. Adversity is the inspector of our con- 
stitutions ; she simply tries our muscle and powers 
of endurance, and should be a periodical visitor. 
But until she comes, no man is known. 



Man is the laughing animal ; and at the end of 
an infinite search, the philosopher finds himself 
clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit, — 
purely human and sane and comforting. So let 
us be cordially thankful to those who furnish matter 
for sound embracing laughter. 



The man who speculates blindfold is a fowl who 
walks into market to be plucked. 



Can you pray? Can you put away all props 
of self? This is true worship, unto whatsoever 
Power you kneel. 

The two men composing most of us at the 
outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle 



SANDRA BELLONL 51 

within him, both having become awakened. If 
they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will 
fuse them into one, who 'is commonly a person of 
some strength ; but throttling is the custom be- 
tween them, and we are used to see men of 
murdered halves. These men have what they 
fought for ; they are unaware of any guilt that 
may be charged against them, though they know 
that they do not embrace Life ; and so it is that 
we have vague discontent too universal. Change, 
O Lawgiver ! the length of our minority, and let 
it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought out 
in approving daylight. The period of our duality 
should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as 
that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man 
an individual, who is a pair of alternately kick- 
ing scales? He has drunk Latin like a vital air, 
and can quote what he rem.embers of Homer; 
but how has he been fortified for this tremendous 
conflict of opening manhood, which is to our hfe 
here what is the landing of a soul to the Hfe 
to come? 



Disappointment vitiated many of Lady Char- 
lotte's first impulses ; and not until strong antago- 



52 SANDRA BELLONI. 

nism had thrown her upon her generosity could 
she do justice to the finer natures about her. 
There was full life in her veins, and she was 
hearing the thirty fatal bells that should be music 
to a woman, if melancholy music ; and she had 
not lived. Time, that sounded in her ears, as it 
kindled no past, spoke of no future. She was in 
unceasing rivalry with all of her sex who had a 
passion, or a fixed affection, or even an employ- 
ment. A sense that she was wronged by her fate, 
haunted this lady. Rivalry on behalf of a man 
she would have held mean, she would have plucked 
it from her bosom at once. She was simply en- 
vious of those who in the face of death could 
say, '' I have lived. " Pride and the absence of 
self-inspection kept her blind to her disease. No 
recollection gave her joy, save of the hours in 
the hunting-field. There she led gallantly ; but it 
was not because of leading that she exulted. There 
the quick blood struck on her brain like wine, and 
she seemed for the time to have one of the crowns 
of life. An object — who cared how small? — was 
ahead : a poor fox trying to save his brush ; and 
Charlotte would have it if the master of cunning 
did not beat her. '' It 's my natural thirst for 



SANDRA BELLONL 53 

blood, " she said. She did not laugh now and 
then that the old red brush dragging over gray 
dews towards a yellow yolk in the curdled winter 
morning sky was the single thing that could make 
her heart throb. 

The truth is, we rarely indulge in melancholy 
until we take it as a luxury. 



Despair, as I have said before, is a wilful busi- 
ness, common to corrupt blood, and to weak, 
woful minds ; native to the sentimentaHst of the 
better order. 



The submerged self — self in the depths — 
rarely speaks to the occasion, but lies under the 
calamity, quietly apprehending all, willing that the 
talker overhead (the surface self) should deceive 
others, and herself likewise, if possible. 



Malice is the barb of beauty. 



Passion is noble strength on fire. 



The reproaching of Providence by a man of 
full growth comes to some extent from his mean- 



54 SANDRA BELLONI. 

ness, and chiefly from his pride. He remembers 
that the old gods selected great heroes whom to 
persecute, and it is his compensation for material 
losses to conceive himself a distinguished mark 
for the powers of air. One who wraps himself 
in this delusion may have great qualities ; he can- 
not be of a very contemptible nature ; and in this 
place we will discriminate more closely than to 
call him a fool. 



RHODA FLEMING. 



RHODA FLEMING. 



Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what 
we are. . . . Young men easily fancy that when 
the black volume is shut, the tide is stopped. 
Saying " I was a fool,'* they believe they have put 
an end to the foolishness. What father teaches 
them that a human act, once set in motion, flows 
on forever to the great account ? 



The characteristic of girls having a disposition 
to rise is to be cravingly mimetic. 



There is a fate attached to some women, from 
Helen of Troy dov/nward, that blood is to be 
shed for them. 

The day indeed is sad when we see the skel- 
eton of the m.istress by whom we suffer, but cannot 
abandon her. 



58 RHODA FLEMING. 

The office of critic is now, in fact, virtually ex- 
tinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is uni- 
versal and imperative. Classic appeals to the 
intellect, and passions not purely domestic, have 
grown obsolete. 

Country people are not inclined to tolerate the 
display of a passion for anything. They find it 
as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst 
of larger congregations, what we call genius. 



Veterans in their arm-chairs strip the bloom 
from life, and show it to be bare bones. They 
take their wisdom for an experience of the past ; 
they are but giving their sensations in the present. 
Not to perceive this is youth's error when it hears 
old gentlemen talking at their ease. 



Man's aim is to culminate ; but it is the saddest 
thing in the world to feel that we have accom- 
plished it. 

When we appear most incongruous, we are 
often exposing the key to our characters. 



RHODA FLEMING. 59 



Women can make for themselves new spheres, 
new laws, if they will assume their right to be 
eccentric as an unquestionable thing, and always 
reserve a season for showing forth, like the conven- 
tional women of society. 

Silence is commonly the slow poison used by 
those who mean to murder love. There is nothing 
violent about it ; no shock is given ; Hope is not 
abruptly strangled, but merely dreams of evil, and 
fights with gradually stifling shadows. When the 
last convulsions come, they are not terrific ; the 
frame has been weakened for dissolution; love 
dies like natural decay. It seems the kindest way 
of doing a cruel thing. 

Old letters are the dreariest ghosts in the world, 
and you cannot keep more treacherous rubbish in 
your possession. 

The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a 
master. 

Words big in the mouth serve their turn when 
there is no way of satisfying the intelligence. 



6o RHODA FLEMING, 

What is worthless if it be well looked at ? Nay, 
the most worthless creatures are most serviceable 
for examination when the microscope is applied to 
them as a simple study of human mechanism. 



Work is medicine. A truism ! Truisms, whether 
they lie in the depths of thought or on the surface, 
are at any rate the pearls of experience. 



It is sufficient for some men to know they are 
seen through, in order to turn away in loathing from 
her whom they have desired ; when they do turn 
away, they not uncommonly turn, with a rush of 
old affection, to those who have generously trusted 
them in the days past, and bUndly thought them 
estimable beings. 

The young man who can look on them we call 
fallen women with a noble eye, is to my mind he 
that is most nobly begotten of the race, and likeli- 
est to be the sire of a noble line. 



The creature's soul had put no gloss upon her 
sin. She had sinned, and her suffering was man- 
ifest. She had chosen to stand up and take the 



RHODA FLEMING. 6 1 

scourge of God ; after which the stones cast by men 
are not painful. By this I mean that she had vol- 
untarily stripped her spirit bare of evasion, and 
seen herself for what she was, pleading no excuse. 
His scourge is truth, and she had faced it. 



The precious metal, which is knowledge, sir, is 
only to be obtained by mining for it ; and that 
excellent occupation necessarily sends a man out of 
sight for a number of years. 



One learns to have compassion for fools, by 
studying them ; and the fool, though Nature is 
wise, is next door to Nature. 



She has the manners of a lady : a lady, I say, — 
not of the modern young lady, with whom, I am 
happy to say, she does not come into competition. 
She has not been sedulously trained to pull her 
way, when she is to go into harness with a yoke- 
fellow. 

Imagination misled the old man. There have 
been spotless reputations gained in the service of 



62 RHODA FLEMING. 

virtue before now, and chaste and beautiful per- 
sons have walked the narrow plank, envied and 
admired, and they have ultimately tottered and all 
but fallen, or they have quite fallen, from no worse 
incitement than curiosity. Cold curiosity, as the 
directors of our human constitution tell us, is, in the 
colder condition of our blood, a betraying vice, 
leading to sin at a period when the fruits of sin 
afford the smallest satisfaction. It is, in fact, our 
last probation, and one of our latest delusions. If 
that is passed successfully, we may really be pro- 
nounced of some worth. 



Can a man go farther than his nature ? Never, 
when he takes passion on board. By other means 
his nature may be enlarged and nerved ; but passion 
will find his weakness, and, while urging him on, 
will constantly betray him at that point. 



V I T T O R I A. 



VITTORIA 



Heads, you illustrious young gentlemen, heads, 
not legs and arms, move a conspiracy. 

In the end, a country true to itself, and deter- 
mined to claim God's gift to brave men, will over- 
match a mere army, however solid its face. But an 
inspired energy of faith is demanded of it. 



VrrroRiA's spirit was in one of those angry knots 
which are half of the intellect, half of the will, and 
are much under the domination of one or other of 
the passions in the ascendant. She was resolved 
to go forward ; she felt justified in going forward : 
but the divine afflatus of enthusiasm buoyed her no 
longer, and she required the support of all that 
accuracy of insight and senseless stubbornness 
which there might be in her nature. The feeling 
that it was she to whom it was given to lift the 



66 VITTORIA, 



torch and plant the standard of Italy, had swept 
her as through the strings of a harp. 



For when the soul of a youth can be heated 
above common heat, the vices of passion shrivel 
up and aid the purer flame. 



Among the nobler order of women there is, when 
they plunge into strife, a craving for idealistic 
truths which men are apt, under the heat and hurry 
of their energies, to put aside as stars that are 
meant merely for shining. 



A MAN may have good nerve to face the scene 
which he is certain will be enacted, who shrinks 
from an hour that is suspended in doubt. 



The flattery of beholding a great assembly of 
human creatures bound glittering in wizard subser- 
vience to the voice of one soul, belongs to the 
artist, and is the cantatrice's glory, pre-eminent 
over whatever poor glory the world gives. 



This is what the great voice does for us. It 
rarely astonishes our ears. It illumines our souls, 



VITTORIA. 67 



as you see the lightning make the unintelHgible 
darkness leap into long mountain-ridges, and twist- 
ing vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of 
light within light, rose-Uke, towards a central core 
of violet heat. 

The poetic definition of "now," is that it is a 
small boat, my daughter, in which the female heart 
is constantly pushing out to sea and sinking. " To- 
morrow " is an island in the deeps, where grain 
grows. 

A GREAT voice is an ocean. You cannot drain 
it with forty thousand opera-hats. It is something 
found, — an addition to the wealth of life. 



ViTTORiA read the faces of the mornings as human 
creatures have tried to gather the sum of their 
destinies off changing surfaces, — fair not meaning 
fair, nor black black, but either the mask upon the 
secret of God's terrible will ; and to learn it and 
submit, was the spiritual burden of her motherhood 
that the child leaping within her might live. Not 
to hope blindly in the exceeding anxiousness of 
her passionate love, nor blindly to fear ; not to let 



68 VITTORIA. 



her soul fly out among the twisting chances ; not 
to sap her great maternal duty by affecting stoical 
serenity, — to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle 
her womanly weakness with the tears which are 
poison when repressed ; to be at peace with a dis- 
astrous world for the sake of the dependent life 
unborn : by such pure efforts she clung to God. 
Soft dreams of sacred nuptial tenderness, tragic im- 
ages, wild pity, were like phantoms enclosing her as 
she went ; but they were beneath her feet, and she 
kept them from lodging betw^een her breasts. The 
thought that her husband, though he should have 
perished, was not a life lost if their child lived, 
sustained her powerfully. . . . The mountains and 
the valleys scarce had names for her understanding ; 
they were but a scene where the will of her Maker 
was at work. Rarely has a soul been so subjected 
by its own force. She certainly had the image of 
God in her mind. 



Our life is but a little holding, lent 
To do a mighty labour. We are one 
With Heaven and the stars when it is spent 
To serve God's aim ; else die we with the sun. 



THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY 
RICHMOND. 



THE 

ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND. 



One who has indulged his soul in invective will 
not, if he has power in his hand, be robbed of his 
climax with impunity, by a cool response that 
seems to trifle, and scourges. 



I 'VE stopped my tongue all this while before a 
scoundrel 'd corkscrew the best-botded temper 
right or left, go where you will, one end o' the 
world to the other. 



Hark you, INIary Waddy, who 're a widdie, which 
's as much as say, an unocc'pied mind, there 's 
Cockney, and there 's country, and there 's school. 
Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sedi- 
ment. 



72 ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND, 

John Thresher had a laborious mind ; it cost 
him beads on his forehead to mount to these satis- 
factory heights of meditation. He told me once 
that he thought one's country was like one's wife : 
you were bom in the first, and married to the 
second, and had to learn all about them afterwards, 
— ay, and make the best of them. 



To hope and not be impatient is really to believe. 



There is nothing like a pent-up secret of the 
heart for accumulating powers of speech, — I mean 
in youth. The mental distilling process sets in 
later, and then you have irony instead of elo- 
quence. 

When you think long undividedly of a single 
object, it gathers light ; and when you draw near it 
in person, the strange thing to your mind is the 
absence of that hght. 



Boys are always putting down the ciphers of 
their observations of people beloved by them, 
but do not add up a sum-total. 



AD VENTURES OF HARR Y RICHMOND. 7 3 

For a princess who is no more than princess, 
her ancestors are a bundle of fagots, and she, with 
her mind and heart tied fast to them, is, at least a 
good half of her, dead wood. 



We can err very easily in youth; and to find 
ourselves shooting at a false mark uncontrollably, 
must be a cruel thing. . . . For who beguiles so 
much as Self? Tell her to play, she plays her 
sweetest. Lurk to surprise her, and what a ser- 
pent she becomes ! She is not to be aware that 
you are watching her. You have to review her 
acts, observe her methods. Always be above her ; 
then by and by you catch her hesitating at cross- 
roads ; then she is bare : you catch her bewailing 
or exulting; then she can no longer pretend she 
is other than she seems. I make Self the femi- 
nine, for she is the weaker, and the soul has to 
purify and raise her. 



Now I ask [said Dr. Julius] whether you have 
a scheme of life, that I may know whether you 
are to be another of those huge human pumpkins, 
called rich men, who cover your country anH 



74 AD VENTURES OF HARR V RICHMOND. 

drain its blood and intellect. Your nobles are 
nothing but rich men inflated with empty tra- 
ditions of insufferable, because unwarrantable pride, 
and drawing substance from alliances with the 
merchant class. Are they your leaders ? Do they 
lead you in letters ? in the arts ? ay, or in govern- 
ment ? No, not — I am informed — not even in 
military service ! And these our titled witlings do 
manage to hold up their brainless pates. You are 
all in one mass, struggling in the stream to get out, 
and lie, and wallow, and belch on the banks. You 
work so hard that you have all but one aim, and 
that is fatness and ease ! 



'' You worship your aristocracy, " went on the 
German Professor, ''it is notorious. You have a 
sort of sagacity. . . . You worship your so-called 
aristocracy perforce, in order to preserve an ideal 
of contrast to the vulgarity of the nation." 



Astronomers condescending to earthly philos- 
ophy may admit that advance in the physical uni- 
verse is computable, though not perceptible. Some- 
whither we tend, shell and spirit. You English, 



AD VENTURES OF HARR V RICHMOND- 7 5 

fighting your little battles of domestic policy, and 
sneering at us for flying at higher game, — you 
unimpressionable English, who won't believe in the 
existence of aims that don't drop on the ground 
before your eyes, and squat and stare at you, — you 
assert that man's labor is completed when the poor 
are kept from crying out. 



Now my question is, Have you a scheme of 
life consonant with the spirit of modem philoso- 
phy, — with the views of intelligent, moral, humane 
beings of this period ? Or are you one of your 
robust English brotherhood, worthy of Cahgula in 
his prime, lions in gymnastics — for a time ; sheep 
always in the dominions of mind ; and all of one 
pattern, all in a rut ! 



Aim your head at a star — your head ! — and 
even if you miss it you don't fall. It 's that light 
dancer, that gambler, the heart in you, my good 
young man, which aims itself at inaccessible heights, 
and has the fall — somewhat icy to reflect on ! 
It 's a mind that wins a mind. 



J 6 AD VENTURES OF HARR V RICHMOND. 

The bone and marrow of study form the surest 
antidote to the madness of that light gambler, the 
heart. 

The world has accurate eyes, if they are not 
very penetrating. The world will see a want of 
balance immediately, and also too true a balance, 
but it will not detect a depth of concord between 
two souls that do not show some fretfulness on the 
surface. 



If a man's fate were as a forbidden fruit, de- 
tached from him, and in front of him, he might 
hesitate fortunately before plucking it ; but, as 
most of us are aware, the vital half of it lies in the 
seed paths he has traversed. 



We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning. 
The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing. 
Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor 
is it ever the new man of to-day who grasps his 
future, good or ill. We are pushed to it by the 
hundreds of days we have buried eager ghosts. 
And if you have not the habit of taking counsel 



AD VENTURES OF HARE V RICHMOND. 7 7 

with them, you are but an instrument in their 
hands. 

A man's review of the course of his Hfe grows 
for a moment stringently serious, when he beholds 
the stream broadening perchance under the light. 



Excellent is pride ; but oh ! be sure of its 
foundations before you go on building monument 
high. I know nothing to equal the anguish of an 
examination of the basis of one's pride that dis- 
covers it not solidly fixed ; an imposing, self-im- 
posing structure, piled upon empty cellarage. . . . 
A man's pride is the front and head-piece of his 
character, his soul's support or snare. 



I HAVE to thank the interminable hours on my 
wretched sick-bed for a singularly beneficial inves- 
tigation of the ledger of my deeds and omissions 
and moral stock. 

Nothing but poetry makes romances passable ; 
for poetry is the everlastingly and embracingly 
human. Without it your fictions are flat foolish- 
ness, non-nourishing substance, — a species of 



78 AB VENTURES OF HARR Y RICHMOND. 

brandy and gruel ! — diet for craving stomachs that 
can support nothing solider, and must have the 
weak stuff stiffened. 



One would like possibly, after expulsion out of 
Eden, to climb the gates to see how the trees grow 
there. 

One who consents to live as I had done, in a 
hope and a retrospect, will find his life slipping 
between the two, like the ships under the striding 
Colossus. 

Parsons and petticoats must always mince the 
meat to hash the fact. 



The contemplation of the curious littleness of 
the lives of men and women lived in this England 
of ours, made me feel as if I looked at them out 
of a palace balcony-window ; for no one appeared 
to hope very much or to fear ; people trotted in 
their different kinds of harness. . . . An existence 
without colour, without anxious throbbings, without 
saUent matter for thought, challenged contempt. 



AD VENTURES OF HARR V RICHMOND, 79 

Puns are the small-pox of the language ; we 're 
cursed with an epidemic. By gad ! the next time 
I meet him I '11 roar out for vaccine matter. 



The stultification of one's feelings and ideas in 
circumstances which divide and set them at vari- 
ance is worse than positive pain. 



My strivings were against my leanings ; and 
imagining the latter, which involved no sacrifice of 
the finer sense of honour, to be in the direction of 
my lower nature, I repelled them to preserve a lofty 
aim that led me through questionable ways. 



Egoism is not peculiar to any period of life ; it 
is only especially curious in a young man beginning 
to match himself against his elders, for in him it 
suffuses the imagination ; he is not merely selfishly 
sentient, or selfishly scheming; his very concep- 
tions are selfish. 

In my time, all young gentlemen were bom 
Tories. The doctor no more expected to see a 
Radical come into the world from a good family 
than a radish. 



8o AD VENTURES OF HARR V RICHMOND, 

This looking at the roots of yourself, if you are 
possessed of a nobler half that will do it, is a sound 
corrective of an excessive ambition. 



Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds 
diseased ; not to sit down in sight of them rumi- 
nating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the 
soul and set you measuring our lean humanity 
against yonder sublime and infinite ; but mount, 
rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks ; 
taste danger, sweat, earn rest; learn to discover 
ungrudgingly, that haggard fatigue is the fair vision 
you have run to earth, and that rest is your utter- 
most reward. Would you know what it is to hope 
again, and have all your hopes at hand ? — hang upon 
the crags at a gradient that makes your next step 
a debate between the thing you are and the thing 
you may become. There the many little hopes 
grow for the cHmber, like flowers and food, imme- 
diate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient if just 
within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. Now 
the old lax life closes in about you there ! You 
are the man of your faculties, nothing more. 
Why should a man pretend to be more? We 



AD VENTURES OF HARR Y RICHMOND. 8 1 

ask it wonderingly when we are healthy. Poetic 
rhapsodists in the vale below may tell you of the 
joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they can- 
not pluck you the medical herb. He gets that for 
himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall 
to behold the distant Sennhlittchen twinkle, who 
leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude 
of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the 
mountain kine. 



To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering 
wretch is common. 



The moods of half-earnest men and feeble lovers 
narrowly escape the farcical. 



Is it any waste of time to write of love ? The 
trials of life are in it, but in a narrow ring and a 
fierier. You may learn to know yourself through 
love, as you do after years of life, whether you are 
fit to lift them that are about you, or whether you 
are but a cheat and a load on the backs of your 
fellows. The impure perishes, the inefficient lan- 
guishes, the moderate comes to its autumn of 

6 



82 AD VENTURES OF HA RR V RICHMOND, 

decay — these are of the kinds which aim at sat- 
isfaction to die of it soon or late. The love that 
survives has strangled craving ; it lives because it 
lives to nourish and succour like the heavens. 

But to strangle craving is indeed to go through 
a death before you reach your immortality. 



TliE EGOIST. 



THE EGOIST. 



Most of the people one has at a dinner-table 
are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only 
way to get a sound. When they can be per- 
suaded to do it upon one another, they call it 
conversation. 



Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes 
shadowing over our bright ideal planet. It will 
not seem the planet's fault, but truth's. Reality is 
the offender; delusion our treasure that we are 
robbed of. Then begins with us the term of wilful 
delusion, and its necessary accompaniment of the 
disgust of reality. 



She said, ^' I must be myself to be of any value 
to you, Willoughby.'* She would not bum the world 



86 THE EGOIST. 



for him ; she would not, though a purer poetry is 
little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense 
or essence, in honor of him, and so, by love's trans- 
mutation, literally be the man she was to marry. 
She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of 
woman 1 

The language of the primitive sentiments of 
men is of the same expression at all times, minus 
the primitive colours when a modem gentleman 
addresses his lady. 



CyniciSxM is intellectual dandyism without the 
coxcomb's feathers. 



The world has faults ; glaciers have crevasses, 
mountains have chasms ; but is not the effect of 
the whole sublime? 



Men whose pride is their backbone suffer con- 
vulsions where other men are barely aware of a 
shock. 

She conceived the state of marriage with him 
[Sir Willoughby] as that of a woman tied, not to a 



THE EGOIST. 87 



man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over 
with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him 
expound them, relishingly renewing his lectures on 
them. 

" The ideal of conduct for women is to subject 
their minds to the part of an accompaniment." 



The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and 
it brings the touchstone to our natures. I speak of 
love, not the mask, and not of the flutings upon 
the theme of love, but of the passion; a flame 
having, like our mortality, death in it as well as life, 
that may or may not be lasting. 



In the hundred and fourth chapter of the thir- 
teenth volume of the ^' Book of Egoism," it is writ- 
ten, ^'Possession without obligation to the object 
possessed approaches felicity, ^^ 

It is the rarest condition of ownership. For 
example : the possession of land is not without 
obligation both to the soil and tax-collector ; the 
possession of fine clothing is oppressed by obliga- 



88 THE EGOIST. 



tion ; gold, jewelry, works of art, enviable house- 
hold furniture, are positive fetters ; the possession 
of a wife we find surcharged with obligation. In 
all these cases possession is a gentle term for en- 
slavement, bestowing the sort of felicity attained to 
by the helot drunk. You can have the joy, the 
pride, the intoxication of possession : you can 
have no free soul. But there is one instance of 
possession, and that the most perfect, which leaves 
us free, under not a shadow of obligation, receiv- 
ing ever, never giving, or if giving, giving only of 
our waste ; as it were, by form of perspiration, 
radiation, if you like ; unconscious poral bountiful- 
ness ; and it is a beneficent process for the system. 
Our possession of an adoring female's worship is 
this instance. The soft cherishable Parsee is 
hardly at any season other than prostrate. She 
craves nothing save that you continue in being, — 
her sun, — which is your firm constitutional endeavor, 
and thus you have a most exact alliance ; she sup- 
plying spirit to your matter, while at the same time 
presenting matter to your spirit, verily a comfort- 
able apposition. The Gods do bless it. 



THE EGOIST. 89 



The beauty of laws for human creatures is their 
adaptabihty to new stitching. 



Quick natures run out to calamity in any little 
shadow of it flung before. Terrors of apprehension 
drive them. They stop not short of the uttermost 
when they are on the wings of dread. A frown 
means tempest, a wind wreck ; to see fire is to be 
seized by it. 

Maidens are commonly reduced to read the 
masters of their destinies by their instincts. 



We do not with impunity abandon the initiative. 
Men who have yielded it are like cavalry put on 
the defensive ; a very small force with an ictus will 
scatter them. 

The slave of a passion thinks in a ring, as hares 
run j he will cease where he began. 



Women have us back to the conditions of primi- 
tive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost 



90 THE EGOIST. 



Star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us 
what we are to them ; for us they are our back and 
front of Hfe ; the poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice ; 
ours is the choice. And were it proved that some 
of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, 
with the stamp of his coin on their palms, and that 
some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the 
less might we say that they find us out, they have 
us by our leanings. They are to us what we hold 
of best or worst within. By their state is our 
civilization judged ; and if it is hugely animal still, 
that is because primitive men abound and will have 
their pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders 
must bow their heads to the sentence. 



Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism 
seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under 
apprehension of an invasion of rights ; it is in 
action the tiger threatened by a rifle, when his paw 
is rigid on quick flesh ; he tears the flesh for rage 
at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original 
male in giant form, had no bleeding victim beneath 
his paw, but there was the sex to mangle. 



THE EGOIST. 91 



Young women are trained to cowardice. For 
them to front an evil with plain speech is to be 
guilty of effrontery, and forfeit the waxen polish of 
purity, and therewith their commanding place in 
the market. They are trained to please man's taste, 
for which purpose they soon learn to live out of 
themselves, and look on themselves as he looks. 
Without courage, conscience is a sorry guest ; and 
if all goes well with the pirate captain, conscience 
will be made to walk the plank for being of no 
service to either party. 



The strict man of honour plays a part that he 
should not reflect on till about the fall of the cur- 
tain, otherwise he will be likely sometimes to feel 
the shiver of foolishness at his good conduct. 



In the first gush of our wisdom drawn directly 
from experience there is a mortal intoxication 
that cancels the old world and establishes a new 
one, not allowing us to ask whether it is too late. 



Pathos is a tide ; often it carries the awakener 
of it off his feet, and whirls him over and over, 



92 THE EGOIST, 



armour and all, in ignominious attitudes of helpless 
prostration, whereof he may well be ashamed in 
the retrospect. We cannot quite preserve our 
dignity when we stoop to the work of. calling forth 
tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump 
away from the rock after that venerable lawgiver 
had knocked the water out of it. 



The man who can be a friend is the man who 
will presume to be a censor. 



There are times when there is no medicine for 
us in sages, we want slaves ; we scorn to temporize, 
we must overbear. 



If we are not to be beloved, spare us the small 
coin of compliments on character. 



Cleverness in women is not uncommon. Intel- 
lect is the pearl. A woman of intellect is as good 
as a Greek statue ; she is divinely wrought, and she 
is divinely rare. 



THE EGOIST. 93 



The hero of two women must die and be wept 
over in common before they can appreciate one 
another. 



At a certain age our teachers are young people ; 
we learn by looking backward. 



Esteem 's a mellow thing, that comes after 
bloom and fire, like an evening at home. 



A ROUGH truth, madam, I should define to be 
that description of truth which is not imparted to 
mankind without a powerful impregnation of the 
roughness of the teller. 



A TRIED steadfast woman is the one jewel of 
the sex. She points to her husband like the sun- 
flower ; her love illuminates him ; she lives in him, 
for him ; she testifies to his worth ; she drags 
the world to his feet; she leads the chorus of 
his praises ; she justifies him in his own esteem. 
Surely there is not on earth such beauty. 



94 THE EGOIST. 



Who are not fools to be set spinning, if we 
choose to whip them with their vanity ! It is the 
consolation of the great to watch them spin. 



To be loved is to feel our littleness, hollowness, 
- feel shame. We come out in all our spots. 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 



Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, 
may be said to stand for nearly everything which 
is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your 
sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any 
kind of posturing. For Beauchamp will not even 
look at happiness to mourn its absence ; melodious 
lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite aUen to 
him. His faith is in working and fighting. With 
every inducement to offer himself for a romantic 
figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of 
modem romance, its shears and its labels : in fine, 
every one of those positive things by whose aid, 
and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nim- 
bus known as a mysterious halo is produced about 
a gentleman's head. . . . We are all given to lose our 
solidity and fly at it ; although the faithful mirror 
of fiction has been showing us latterly that a too 

7 



98 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER, 

superhuman beauty has disturbed popular beUef in 
the bare beginnings of the existence of heroes ; 
but this very hkely is nothing more than a fit of 
RepubHcanism in the nursery, and a deposition of 
the leading doll for lack of variety in him. That 
conqueror of circumstances will, as the dullest soul 
may begin predicting, return on his cock-horse to 
favour and authority. 

Meantime, the exhibition of a hero whom cir- 
cumstances overcome, and who does not weep or 
ask you for a tear, who continually forfeits attract- 
iveness by declining to better his own fortunes, 
must run the chances of a novelty during the 
interregnum. 

Convictions are generally first impressions sealed 
with later prejudices. 



If you meddle with politics, you must submit to 
be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy, soaped 
by your backers and shaved by the foe. 



It happens in war as in wit, that all birds of 
wonder fly to a flaring reputation. He that has 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 99 

done one wild thing must necessarily have done 
the other. 

The winter was dreadful : every kind heart that 
went to bed with cold feet felt acutely for our 
soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of 
heroes were as good as warming pans. 



A BONE in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and 
worry, corrects the vagrancies and promotes the 
healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or 
not. Supposing it furnishes only dramatic enter- 
tainment in that usually vacant tenement or pow- 
der-shell, it will be of service. 



There 's a pitch and tar in poHtics as well as on 
shipboard. 

Rosamond noticed the peculiarity of the books 
he selected for his private reading. They were not 
boy's books, books of adventure and the like. His 
favorite author was one writing of Heroes in (so 
she esteemed it) a style resembling either early 
architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and 



lOO BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

rough it seemed ; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that 
tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit 
with uncouth bluster ; sentences without commence- 
ments running to abrupt endings and smoke, like 
waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words 
giving a hand to street slang, and accents falling on 
them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds ; 
all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing 
a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the 
joints. . . . He had dug the book out of a book- 
seller's shop in Malta, captivated by its title, and 
had, since the day of his purchase, gone at it again 
and again, getting nibbles of golden meaning by in- 
stalments, as with a solitary pick in a very dark 
mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him 
that there was a great deal more in the book than 
there was in himself. 



As for titles, the way to defend them is to be 
worthy of them. 



The future not being bom, my friend, we will 
abstain from baptizing it. 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. loi 



Letters of a lover in an extremity of love, cry- 
ing for help, are as curious to cool strong men as 
the contortions of the proved heterodox tied to a 
stake must have been to their chastening clerical 
judges. 

There is a pause between the descent of a diver 
and his return to the surface, when those who would 
not have him forgotten by the better world above 
him do rightly to relate anecdotes of him, if the)^ 
can, and to provoke laughter at him. The encour- 
agement of the humane sense of superiority over 
an object of interest which laughter gives, is good 
for the object ; and besides, if you begin to tell sly 
stories of one in the deeps, who is holding his 
breath to fetch a pearl or two for you all, you divert 
a particular sympathetic oppression of the chest, 
that the extremely sensitive are apt to suffer from, 
and you dispose the larger number to keep in mind 
a person they no longer see. Otherwise it is likely 
that he will, very shortly after he has made his 
plunge, fatigue the contemplative brains above, and 
be shuffled off them, even as great ocean smooths 
away the dear vanished man's immediate circle of 



I02 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

foam, and rapidly confounds the rippling memory 
of him with its other agitations. And in such a 
case the apparition of his head upon our common 
level once more will almost certainly cause a dis- 
agreeable shock ; nor is it improbable that his first 
natural snorts in his native element, though they be 
simply to obtain his share of the health of Hfe, \\-ill 
draw do\\'n on him condemnation for eccentric be- 
haviour and unmannerly ; and this in spite of the 
jewel he brings, unless it be an exceedingly splendid 
one. The reason is, that our brave world cannot 
pardon a breach of continuity for any petty bribe. 



No man ever did hard work who held counsel 
with his family. The family view of a man's fit 
conduct is the weak point of the countr}^ It is 
no other view than "• Better thy condition for our 
sakes." Ha ! In this way we breed sheep, fatten 
oxen \ men are d}-ing off. Resolution taken to con- 
sult the family, means — waste your time ! Those 
w^ho go to it want an excuse for altering their 
minds. The family view is everlastingly the shop- 
keeper's. Purse, Pence, Ease, increase of worldly 
goods, personal importance, the Pound, the EngUsh 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 103 

Pound ! Dare do that, and you forfeit your share 
of Port wine in this world ; you won't be dubbed 
with a title ; you '11 be fingered at ! Lord, Lord, 
is it the region inside a man, or out, that gives him 
peace ? Out, they say, for they have lost faith in 
the existence of an inner. They have n't it. Air 
sucker, blood pump, cooking machiner}^, and a bat- 
tery of trained instincts, aptitudes, fill up their 
vacuum* 



The wTCtched tinkler called a piano, which tries 
at the whole orchestra and murders every instru- 
ment in the attempt, is like our modern civiliza- 
tion, — a taming and a diminishing of individuals 
for an insipid harmony. 



Man's aim has hitherto been to keep men from 
having a soul for this world. 



It will be found a common case, that when we 
have yielded to our instincts, and then have to 
soothe conscience, we must slaughter somebody 
for a sacrificial offering to our sense of comfort. 



I04 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER, 

Like most men who have Httle to say, he was an 
orator in print ; but that was a poor medium for 
him^ — his body without his fire. 



Delicious and rapturous effects are to be pro- 
duced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a chance 
infusion of the fierier spirit a flavour of Radical- 
ism. That is the thing to set an audience bound- 
ing and quirking. Whereas, if you commence by 
tilting a Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon 
them, you have to resort to the natural element 
for the orator's art of variation, — you are diluted, 
and that 's bathos. 



The Radical orator has but two notes, and one 
is the drawling pathetic, and the other the ultra 
furious ; and the effect of the former we liken to 
the English workingman's wife's hot-set queasy brew 
of well-meant villany, that she calls by the innocent 
name of tea ; and the latter is to be blown, asks to 
be blown, and never should be blown without at 
least seeming to be blown, with an accompani- 
ment of a house on fire. 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 105 

When hear you a thrilling Tory speech that 
carries the country with it, save when the incen- 
diary Radical has shrieked ? 



The address was admirably worded, sir, I make 
bold to say it ; but most indubitably it threatened 
powerful drugs for weak stomachs, and it blew cold 
on votes, which are sensitive plants like nothing 
else in botany. 

The infant candidate delights in his honesty, like 
the babe in its nakedness, the beautiful virgin in 
her innocence. 

A DASH of conventionalism makes the whole 
civilized world kin. 



Beauchamp was dropped by the Esperaiiza' s 
boat near Otley Ferry, to walk along the beach to 
Bevisham, and he kept an eye on the elegant vessel 
as she glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount 
Laurel's park, through merchant craft, colliers, and 
trawlers, loosely shaking her towering snow-white 
sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy, — an 



I06 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

image of a refinement of beauty, and of a beauti- 
ful servicelessness. 

As the yacht, so the mistress ; things of wealth, 
owing their graces to wealth, devoting them to 
wealth, — splendid achievements of art both ! 
and dedicated to the gratification of the superior 
senses. Say they were precious examples of an 
accomplished civilization; and perhaps they did 
offer a visible ideal of grace for the rough world to 
aim at. They might in the abstract address a bit 
of a monition to the uncultivated, and encourage 
the soul to strive toward perfection in beauty ; and 
there is no contesting the value of beauty when the 
soul is taken into account. But were they not in 
too great a profusion in proportion to their utility? 
That was the question for Nevil Beauchamp. The 
democratic spirit inhabitating him, temporarily or 
permanently, asked whether they were not increas- 
ing to numbers which were oppressive. And, 
further, whether it was good for the country, the 
race, ay, the species, that they should be so dis- 
tinctly removed from the thousands who fought the 
grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for 
bread of life. Those grimy sails of the colliers and 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 107 

fishing- smacks, set them in a great sea, would have 
beauty for eye and soul beyond that of elegance 
and refinement. And do but look at them thought- 
fully, the poor are everlastingly, unreUevedly, in 
the abysses of the great sea. 



Did Beauchamp at all desire to have those idly 
lovely adornments of riches, the yacht and the 
lady, swept away? Oh dear no! He admired 
them, he was at home with them. They were 
much to his taste. . . . Beauty plucked the heart 
from his breast. But he had taken up arms ; he 
had drunk of the questioning cup, that which 
denieth peace to us, and projects us upon the 
missionary search of the How^ the Wherefore, and 
the Why Not, ever afterward. 

He questioned his justification and yours, for 
gratifying tastes in an ill-regulated world of wrong- 
doing, suffering, sin, and bounties unrighteously dis- 
pensed, — not sufficiently dispersed. He said by 
and by to pleasure, battle to-day. From his point 
of observation, and with the store of ideas and 
images his fiery yet reflective youth had gathered, 
he presented himself, as it were, saddled to that 



lo8 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

hard-riding force known as the logical impetus, 
which, spying its quarry over precipices, across 
oceans and deserts, and through systems and webs 
and into shops and cabinets of costliest china, will 
come at it, will not be refused, let the distances and 
the breakages be what they may. He went, like the 
meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, 
too quick for a cry of protestations, and reached re- 
sults amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his train- 
ing not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous. 
Ergo is shot forth from the clash of a syllogism. 



There 's always danger in disunion. That 's 
what the rich won't see. They see simply nothing 
out of their own circle ; and they won't take a 
thought of the overpowering contrast between their 
luxury, and the way of living, that 's half starving, of 
the poor. They understand it when fever comes 
up from back alleys and cottages, and then they 
join their efforts to sweep the poor out of the 
district. The poor are to get their work anyhow, 
after a long morning's walk over the prescribed 
space ; for we must have poor, you know. The 
wife of a parson I canvassed yesterday said to me, 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 109 

'' Who is to work for us if you do away with the 
poor, Captain Beauchamp?'' 



I HAVE heard that man say that the Church 
stands to show the passion of the human race for 
the drama. . . . He calls the Protestant clergy the 
social police of the English middle class. . . . He 
has sharp eyes for the sins of the poor. As for the 
rich, they support his church, they listen to his 
sermon — to set an example. 



It 's put down to the wickedness of human 
nature, that the parson has not got hold of the 
people. The parsons have lost them by a senseless 
Conservatism, because they look to the Tories for 
the support of their church, and let the religion 
run down the gutters. 



Earnestness works out its own cure more surely 
than frenzy. 

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to 
such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men 
ruling ! So despotic an oligarchy as would be 



no BEAUCHAMFS CAREER, 

there is not a happy subject of contemplation. It 
is not too much to say that a domination of the 
Intellect in England would at once and entirely 
alter the face of the country. We should be gov- 
erned by the head with a vengeance ; all the rest 
of the country being base members indeed, — Spar- 
tans' helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would 
wither to the root ; fun would die out of Parlia- 
ment, and outside of it ; we could never laugh at 
our masters or command them. 



Do you not hear in imagination the land's regrets 
for that amiable nobility whose pretensions were 
comically built on birth, acres, style, and an air ? . . . 
At present I believe it to be their honest opinion, 
common to a majority of them, that it is more 
salutary besides more diverting to have the fools 
of the kingdom represented than not. . . . That 
would be an inaccessible tyranny of a very small 
minority, necessarily followed by tremendous con- 
vulsions. 

CoNGHAM also, Congham had passed through his 
Radical phase, as one does on the road to wis- 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. ill 

dom. So the frog telleth tadpoles : he too has 
wriggled most preposterous of tails; and he has 
shoved a circular flat head into comers unadapted 
to its shape ; and that the undeveloped one should 
dutifully listen to experience, and accept guidance, 
is devoutly to be hoped. 



A CLOUD of millinery shoots me off a mile from 
a woman. 



If you have a nation politically corrupt, you 
won't have a good state of morals in it, and the 
laws that keep society together bear upon the poli- 
tics of a country. 

Women don't care uncommonly for the men 
who love them, though they like precious well to be 
loved. 

A THOROUGHLY good-looking girl, who takes to a 
fellow for what he 's doing in the world, must have 
ideas of him precious different from the adoration 
of six feet three and a fine seat in the saddle. 



I SAY that the education for women is to teach 
them to rely on themselves. 



112 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

The slavery of the love of a woman chained 
like Renee, was the most revolting of prospects to 
a man who cherished his freedom that he might 
work to the end of time. . . . Her presence re- 
sembled those dark sunsets throwing the spell of 
colour across the world ; when there is no question 
with us of morning or of night, but of that sole 
splendour only. 

Renee's gift of speech counted unnumbered 
strings, which she played on with a grace that 
clothed the skill, and was her natural endowment, — 
an art perfected by the education of the world. 
Who cannot talk ! but who can ? Discover the 
writers in a day when all are writing ! It is as rare 
an art as poetry, and in the mouths of women as 
enrapturing, richer than their voices in music. 



Language flowed from Renee in affinity with the 
pleasure-giving laws that make the curves we recog- 
nize as beauty in sublimer arts. 



Would you, that are separable from boys and 
mobs, and the object malignly called the Briton, 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER, 113 

prefer the celestial singing of a woman to her ex- 
cellently talking ? But not if it were given you to 
run in unison with her genius of the tongue, follow- 
ing her verbal ingenuities and feminine silk flashes 
of meaning ; not if she led you to match her fine, 
quick perceptions with more or less of the discreet 
concordance of the violoncello accompanying the 
viol. 

Name the two countries which alone have pro- 
duced The Woman, the ideal woman, the woman of 
art, whose beauty, grace, and wit offer her to our 
contemplation in an atmosphere above the ordinary 
conditions of the world : these two countries are 
France and Greece. None other give you the 
perfect woman, the woman who conquers time, as 
she conquers men, by virtue of the divinity in her 
blood ; and she, as little as illustrious heroes, is 
to be judged by the laws and standards of lesser 
creatures. In fashioning her, nature and art have 
worked together ; in her, poetry walks the earth. 



Old love reviving may be love of a phantom, 
after all. We can, if it must revive, keep it to the 
limits of a ghostly love. 



114 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

You may start a sermon from stones to hit 
the stars. 



He must be a practised orator who shall de- 
scend out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump 
of the concrete. 



Note, then, that Radicals, always marching to the 
triumph, never taste it ; and for Tories it is Dead 
Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths ! Those Liberals, 
those temporizers, compromisers, a concourse of 
atoms ! glorify themselves in the animal satisfac- 
tion of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they 
pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, 
for they have no vital principle. 



Cowardice is even worse for nations than for 
individual men. 



May not one love, not craving to be beloved? 
Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports 
it ; increases rather than diminishes our noble self- 
esteem. To attain such a love the martyrs writhed 
up to the crown of saints. 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 115 

One may venerate old families when they show 
the blood of the founder. 



That is no aristocracy, if it does not head the 
people in virtue, — military, political, national ; I 
mean the qualities required by the times for lead- 
ership. 

One may be as a weed of the sea while one's 
fate is being decided. To love is to be on the sea, 
out of sight of land. 

Glorious, and solely glorious love, that has 
risen above emotion, quite independent of crav- 
ing ! That is to be the bird of upper air, poised 
on his wings. It is a home in the sky. 



On with your mission, and never a summing of 
results in hand, nor thirst for prospects, nor count- 
ing upon harvests ; for seed sown in faith day by 
day is the nightly harvest of the soul, — and with 
the soul we work, with the soul we see. 



Desires to realize our gains are akin to the 
passion of usury ; these are tricks of the usurer to 
grasp his gold in act and imagination. 



Ii6 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

'^WoRK at the people." At them, remark! — 
Moveless do they seem to you ? Why, so is the earth 
to the sowing husbandman, and though we cannot 
forecast a reaping season, we have in history dura- 
ble testification that our seasons come in the souls 
of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in 
motion, and faster and faster are we spinning it, 
and firmer and firmer shall we set it to regularity 
of revolution. 

Professors, prophets, masters, each hitherto has 
had his creed and system to offer, good mayhap 
for the term ; and each has put it forth for the 
truth everlasting, to drive the dagger to the heart 
of time, and put the axe to human growth ! That 
one circle of wisdom, issuing of the experience and 
needs of their day, should act the despot over all 
other circles forever ! So vv^here at first light shone 
to light the yawning frog to his wet ditch, there 
with the necessitated revolution of men's minds 
in the course of ages darkness radiates. 



His insensibility to music was curious, consid- 
ering how impressionable he was to verse and to 
songs of birds. He listened with an oppressed 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER, 117 

look, as to something the particular secret of 
which had to be reached by a determined effort of 
sympathy for those whom it affected. He liked it, 
if she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he 
liked it, clearly trying hard to comprehend it, as 
unmoved by the swell and sigh of the resonant 
brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit 
thrilled to it, and was beautiful in glowing visions 
and in tenderness. 



She was one of the artificial creatures called 
women, who dare not be spontaneous, and cannot 
act independently if they would continue to be 
admirable in the world's eye, and who, for that 
object, must remain fixed on shelves, like other 
marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shat- 
tering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in 
degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and 
Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty 
slaves to the dealers. 



The children of wealth and the children of the 
sun alike believe that Providence is for them, and 
it would seem that the former can do without it less 



Il8 BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 

than the latter, though the former are less inclined 
to give it personification. 



Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman 
than Renee ; but on which does the eye linger 
longest, — which draws the heart? a radiant land- 
scape when the tall, ripe wheat flashes between 
shadow and shine in the stately march of summer, 
or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark water? 



Dark-eyed Renee was not beauty, but attrac- 
tion ; she touched the double chords within us which 
are we know not whether harmony or discord, but 
a divine discord if an uncertified harmony beyond 
plain sweetness or majesty. 



There are touches of bliss in anguish that super- 
humanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of 
the eternal in the variable. 



Ghastly as a minority is in an election, in a 
life-long struggle it is refreshing and encouraging. 
The young world and its triumph is with the 
majority. 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 119 

We who interpret things heavenly by things 
earthly, must not hope to juggle with them for our 
pleasures, and can look to no absolution of evil 
acts. 

An incessant struggle of one man with the 
world, which position usually ranks his relatives 
against him, does not conduce to soundness of 
judgment. 

The world in motion is not so wise that it can 
pretend to silence the outcry of an ordinarily gen- 
erous heart even, — the very infant of antagonism 
to its methods and establishments. 



He really respected Cecilia : it is not too much 
to say that he worshipped her with the devout 
worship rendered to the ideal Englishwoman by 
the heart of the nation. For him she was purity, 
charity, the keeper of the keys of whatsoever is 
held precious by men ; she was a midway saint, a 
light between day and darkness, in whom the spirit 
in the flesh shone like the growing star amid thin, 
sanguine colour, the sweeter, the brighter, the more 



120 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

translucent, the longer known. And if the image 
will allow it, the nearer down to him the holier she 
seemed. 

The slumberer roused in darkness by the relent- 
less, insane-seeming bell which hails him to duty, 
melts at the charms of sleep, and feels that logic is 
with him in his preference of his pillow ; but the 
tireless, revolving world outside, nature's pitiless 
antagonist, has hung one of its balances about him, 
and his actions are directed by the state of the 
scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desirability 
swings like a pendent doll. 



Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the 
well-behaved ^neas, quitting the fair bosom of 
Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an example 
to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his 
backbone and put a cro\vn upon his brows. 



The rich love the nation through their posses- 
sions, other\vise they have no country. If they 
loved the country, they would care for the people. 



BEAUCIIAMP'S CAREER, 121 

Their hearts are eaten up by property. . . . This 
flood of luxury is the body's drunkenness and the 
soul's death. 

The world and nature, which are opposed in 
relation to our vital interests, each agrees to de- 
mand of us a perfect victory, on pain otherwise 
of proving it a stage performance ; and the victory 
over the world, as over nature, is over self; and 
this victory lies in yielding perpetual service to the 
world and none to nature ; for the world has to be 
wrought out, nature to be subdued. 



When life rolls back on us after the long ebb of 
illness, Uttle whispers and diminutive images of the 
old joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts. 



A ROUGH man of rare quality civilizing under 
various influences, and half ludicrous, a little irri- 
tating, wholly estimable, has frequently won the 
benign approbation of the sex. 



The fact is, Beauchamp has no bend in him. 
He can't meet a man without trying to wrestle, and 



122 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

as long as he keeps his stiffness he beheves he has 
won. I Ve heard an ocuUst say that the eye that 
does n't blink ends in blindness, and he who wont 
bend breaks. 

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst 
that we insist on over- satisfying to drown the recol- 
lection of past anguish is baneful to the soul. 



Most of our spiritual guides neglect the root to 
trim the flower. 



The aim at an ideal Hfe closely approaches, or 
easily inclines, to self-worship. 



Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing 
at wonderful colours of a western sky, — an oblivion 
of earthly dates and obligations. What mattered it 
that there were gales in August? She loved the 
sea, and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull, 
and plunging gannet, the sun on the waves, and 
the torn cloud. 

These English, huddling more and more in 
flocks, turning to lumps, getting to be cut in a 



BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 123 

pattern and marked by a label, — how they bark 
and snap to rend an obnoxious original. 



Sound sleep, like hearty dining, endows men 
with a sense of rectitude, and sunlight following 
the former, as a pleasant spell of conversational 
ease or sweet music the latter, smiles a celestial 
approval of the performance. 



We women can read men by their power to love. 
Where love exists, there is goodness. 



The pale flower of imagination, fed by dews, 
not by sunshine, was bom drooping, and hung 
secret in her bosom, shy of a bell of the frail 
wood-sorrel. 

Men who do not live in the present chiefly, but 
hamper themselves with giant tasks in excess of 
alarm for the future, however devoted and noble 
they may be, — and he is an example of one that 
is, — reduce themselves to the dimensions of pyg- 
mies, they have the cry of infants. You reply. 



124 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

Foresight is an element of love of country and 
mankind. But how often is not the foresight 
guesswork ? 

When he was away and winds blew, the clouds 
which obscured an embracing imagination of him 
— such as, to be true and full and sufficient, should 
stretch like the dome of heaven over the humblest 
lives under contemplation — broke, and revealed 
him to her as one in mid-career, in mid-forest, who 
by force of character, advancing in self-conquest, 
strikes his impress right and left around him, 
because of his aim at stars. 



Alas for us ! — this our awful baggage in the rear 
of humanity, these women who have not moved on 
their own feet one step since the primal mother 
taught them to suckle, are perpetually pulling us 
backward on the march. Slaves of custom, forms, 
shows, and superstitions, they are slaves of the 
priests. . . . They are so in gratitude perchance, 
as the matter works. For at one period the priests 
did cherish and protect the weak from animal man. 



BEAUCHAMrS CAREER. 125 

But we have entered a broader daylight now, when 
the sun of high heaven has crowned our structure 
with the flower of brain. . . . Must we still be 
grinning subserviently to ancient usages and stale 
forms, because of a baggage that is, woe to us ! too 
true, and we cannot cut ourselves loose from ? 



My experience of the priest in our country is 
that he has abandoned — he 's dead against — the 
only cause that can justify and keep up a church ; 
the cause of the poor, the people. . . . He 's 
against the cause of the people. Very well ; I 
make my protest to the death against him. When 
he 's a Christian instead of a Churchman^ then 
may my example not be followed. 



There 's neither spiritual nor political brightness 
in England, but a common resolution to eat of 
good things and stick to them. 



The creed that rose in heaven sets below \ and 
where we had an angel we have claw- feet and 



126 BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 

fangs. . . . The creed is much what it was when 
the followers diverged it from the Founder. But 
humanity is not whei^e it was when that creed was 
food and guidance. Creeds will not die not fight- 
ing. We cannot root them up out of us without 
blood. 



Ours is the belief that humanity advances 
beyond the Hmits of creeds, is to be tied to 
none. AVe reverence the Master in his teaching ; 
we behold the limits of him in his creed, and that 
is not his work. We truly are his disciples, who 
see how far it was in him to do service ; not they 
that made of his creed a strait-jacket for humanity. 



In our prayers we dedicate the world to God, 
not calling him great for a title. No, — showing 
him we know him great in a hmitless world, lord 
of a truth we tend to, have not grasped. 



Prayer is good. I counsel it to you again and 
again, in joy, in sickness of heart. The infidel will 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 127 

not pray; the creed slave prays to the image in 
his box. 

We make prayer a part of us, praying for no 
gifts, no interventions, through the faith in prayer 
opening the soul to the undiscerned. And take 
this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer, — 
that it makes us repose on the unknown with con- 
fidence, makes us flexible to change, makes us 
ready for revolution, — for life then ! 



He who has the fountain of prayer in him will 
not complain of hazards. Prayer is the recognition 
of laws ; the soul's exercise and source of strength ; 
its thread of conjunction with them. Prayer for 
an object is the cajolery of an idol ; the resource of 
superstition. . . . We that fight the living world 
must have the universal for succour of the truth in 
it. Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the 
effluence of the outer truth, you join with the 
creative elements giving health to you ; and that 
crust of habit which is the soul's tomb : and custom, 
the soul's tyrant ; and pride, our volcano-peak, that 
sinks us in a crater; and fear, which plucks the 



128 BEAUCHAMFS CAREER. 

feathers from the wings of the soul, and sets it 
shivering in a vault ; — you are free of them ; you 
live in the day and for the future by this exercise 
and discipline of the soul's faith. Us it keeps 
young everlastingly. 



The religion of this vast English middle class 
ruling the land is Comfort. It is their central 
thought, their idea of necessity, their sole aim. 
Whatsoever ministers to comfort, seems to belong 
to it, pretends to support it, they yield their pas- 
sive worship to. Whatsoever alarms it they join 
to crush. There you get at their point of unity. 



Look to the truth in you, and deliver it with no 
afterthought of hope, for hope is dogged by dread ; 
we give our courage as hostage for the falfilment of 
what we hope. 



Service is the noble office on earth, and when 
kings do service let them take the first honors 
of the state. 



BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. 129 

The English middle class, which has absorbed 
the upper, and despises, when it is not quaking 
before it, the lower, will have nothing above it but 
a rickety ornament like that you see on a confec- 
tioner's twelfth-cake. 



THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 



THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS, 



An opinion formed by a woman is inflexible ; 
the fact is not half so stubborn. 



Men and women alike, who renounce their own 
individuality by cowering abjectly under some 
other before the storm, are in reality abjuring 
their idea of that other, and offering themselves up 
to the genius of Power, in whatsoever direction it 
may chance to be manifested, in whatsoever per- 
son. We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent 
to be prey, we lose the soul of election. 



To ask if it was love is useless. Love may be 
celestial fire before it enters into the systems of 
mortals. It will then take the character of its 
place of abode, and we have to look not so much 
for the pure thing as for the passion. 



134 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 

Action means life to the soul as to the body. 
Compromise is virtual death ; it is the pact be- 
tween cowardice and comfort, under the title of ex- 
pediency. So do we gather dead matter about us. 
So are we gradually self- stifled, corrupt. The war 
with evil in every form must be incessant; we 
cannot have peace. Let then our joy be in war ; 
in uncompromising Action, which need not be the 
less a sagacious conduct of the war. . . . Action 
energizes men's brains, generates grander capaci- 
ties, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, 
and is the guaranty of positive conquest for the 
benefit of our species. 



The brainless in Art and in State-craft are noth- 
ing but a httle more obstructive than the dead. It 
is less easy to cut a way through them. 



Try to think individually upon what you have to 
learn collectively. 

Do you know how the look of sunlight on a land 
calms one ? It signifies to the eye possession and 
repose, the end gained, — not the end to labour, 
just heaven ! but peace to the heart's craving, 



THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 135 

which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh 
dip in the waters of life. 



Remember the meaning of ItaUan light and 
colour; the clearness, the luminous fulness, the 
thoughtful shadows. Mountain and wooded head- 
land are solid, deep to the eye, spirit speaking to 
the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Gods 
out of that sky, that sea, those peaks. They live 
with you. How they satiate the vacant soul by 
influx, and draw forth the troubled from its prickly 
nest ! 

In the presence of the irresistible, the conven- 
tional is a crazy structure, swept away with very 
little creaking of its timbers on the flood. 



The carrying on of a prolonged and deter- 
mined you-and-I in company intimates to those 
undetermined floating atoms about us that a cer- 
tain sacred something is in process of formation, or 
has formed. 

The world is a variable monster; it rends the 
weak, whether sincere or false ; but those who weld 



136 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 

Strength with sincerity may practise their rites of 
religion publicly, and it fawns to them and bellows 
to imitate. 

Strength in love is the sole sincerity. 



It is the soul which does things in Hfe, — the 
rest is vapour. 

Light literature is the garden and the orchard, 
the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view 
within us, as well as without. Our blood runs 
through it, our history in the quick. The Philistine 
detests it, because he has no view, out or in. The 
dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, 
peeled and sapless, when they condemn it. 



Shun those who cry out against fiction, and de- 
spise it, and have no taste for elegant writing. Not 
to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to 
have a mind. 

You meet now and then men who have the 
woman in them without being womanized ; they 
are the pick of men. And the choicest women 



THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 13? 



are those who yield not a feather of their woman- 
liness for some amount of manUke strength. 



Who can hold her back when a woman is 
decided to move? Husbands have tried it vainly, 
and parents; and though the husband and the 
parent are not dealing with the same kind of 
woman, you see the same elemental power in her 
under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel 
daughter to break conventional laws and be 
splendidly irrational. 

There is a nerve in brave warriors that does 
not like the battle before the crackle of musketry 
is heard and the big artillery. 



The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be 
self-consoled when they are not self-justified; it 
is their instinctive manner of putting themselves 
in the right to themselves. 



Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so un- 
common as the proportionate equality of feeling : 
we do indeed frequently see with eyes of just 



13S THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS, 



measurement while we are conducting ourselves 
like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the 
spinning nerves will change their complexion ; and 
without enlarging or minimizing, they will alternate 
their effect on us immensely through the colour 
presenting them, — now sombre, now hopeful; 
doing its work of extravagance upon perceptibly 
plain matter. 

Weak souls are much moved by having the 
pathos on their side. 



Alvan was great-hearted ; he could love in his 
giant fashion, love and lay down his life for the 
woman he loved, though the nature of the passion 
was not heavenly; or for the friend — who would 
have to excuse him often; or for the cause — 
which was to minister to his appetites. He was 
true man, a native of earth, and if he could not 
quit his huge personality to pipe spiritual music 
during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged 
in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, 
and giving mighty sound of timber at strife rather 
than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved, to 
his depths. 



THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS. 139 



Love and man sometimes meet for noble con- 
cord ; the strings of the hungry instrument are not 
so rough that Love's touch on them is indistin- 
guishable from the rattling of the wheel within ; 
certain herald harmonies have been heard. But 
Love, which purifies and enlarges us and sets free 
the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame, must have 
time and space, and some help of circumstances, 
to give the world assurance that the man is a 
temple fit for the rites. 



At the age of forty, men that love, love root- 
edly. If the love is plucked from them, the hfe 
goes with it. 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 



What a woman thinks of women is the test of 
her nature. 



Smart remarks have their measured distances, 
many requiring to be a brule pourpoint, or within 
throw of the pistol, to make it hit ; in other words, 
the majority of them are addressed directly to our 
muscular system, and they have no effect when we 
stand beyond the range. 



Still, the promptness to laugh is an excellent 
progenitorial foundation for the wit to come in a 
people. 

When a nation has acknowledged that it is as 
yet but in the fisticuff stage of the art of condens- 
ing our purest sense to golden sentences, a readier 
appreciation will be extended to the gift, which is 



144 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

to Strike, not the dazzled eyes, the unanticipating 
nose, the ribs, the sides, and stun us, twirl us, hood« 
wink, mystify, tickle, and twitch by dexterities of 
lingual sparrings and shufflings, but to strike roots 
in the mind, the Hesperides of good things. 



In England conversationally the men are the 
pointed talkers, and the women conversationally 
fair Circassians. 

He had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast 
discolouration. 

Never should reputation of women trail a scent ! 
How true ! and true also that the women of wax- 
work never do j and that the women of happy 
marriages do not ; nor the women of holy nun- 
neries ; nor the women lucky in their arts. 



She told him that she read rapidly, "2, great 
deal at one gulp," and thought in flashes, — a way 
with the maker of phrases. 



" To be pointedly rational," she said, " is a 
greater difficulty to me than a fine delirium." 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 145 

The young who avoid the region [of Romance] 
escape the title of fool at the cost of a celestial 
crown. 

The sentimental people, in her phrase, fiddle 
harmonies on the strings of sensualism, — to the 
delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical 
execution rather than for music. 



For our world is all but a sensational world at 
present, in maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, 
a brighter-eyed. 

We have to guard against '' half-conceptions of 
wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient charity,'* 
against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues, 
distinguishable as the sickness and writhing of our 
egoism to cast its first slough. 



Service is our destiny in life or in death. Then 
let it be my choice living to serve the living and 
be fretted uncomplainingly. If I can assure my- 
self of doing service, I have my home within. 

10 



146 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

To have the sense of the eternal in Hfe is a 
short flight for the soul. To have had it is the 
soul's vitality. 

Palliation of sin is the hunted creature's refuge 
and final temptation. Our battle is ever between 
spirit and flesh. Spirit must brand the flesh that 
it may live. 

In their judgments upon women, men are fe- 
males, voices of the present (sexual) dilemma. 



They [men] desire to have a still woman, who 
can make a constant society of her pins and 
needles. They create by stoppage a volcano, 
and are amazed at its eruptiveness. 



Of the great loneliness of women she says, " It 
is due to the prescribed circumscription of their 
minds, of which they become aware in agitation. 
Were the walls about them beaten down, they 
would understand that solitariness is a common 
human fate, and the one chance of growth, like 
space for timber." 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 147 



We are informed that the beginning of a motive 
life with women must be in the head equally with 
men. Also that men do not so much fear to lose 
the hearts of thoughtful women, as their strict 
attention to their graces. 



Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are 
like odors of roast meat, past with the pricking of 
the joint. Idea is the only vital breath. 

He gives good dinners, a candid old critic said, 
when asked how it was that he could praise a 
certain poet. In an island of chills and fogs, the 
comic and other perceptions are dependent on 
the stirrings of the gastric juices. 



When our systems shall have been fortified by 
philosophy . . . then, ah ! then, moreover, will the 
noveUst's Art have attained its majority. We can 
then be veraciously historical, honesUy transcrip- 
tive. Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have 
passed away ; Philosophy is the foe of both, and 
their silly cancelling contest perpetually renewed 
in a shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a 



148 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 

phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle the 
contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer 
the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. 



Philosophy bids us see that we are not so pretty 
as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab ; and 
that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren 
aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bear- 
able, fructifying, finally a delight. 



And how may you know that you have reached 
to Philosophy? You touch her skirts when you 
share her hatred of the sham deceit, her derision 
of sentimentalism. You are one with her when — 
but I would not have you a thousand years older ! 
Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental 
route, — that very winding path, which again and 
again brings you round to the point of original 
impetus, when you have to be unwound for another 
whirl ; your point of original impetus being the 
grossly material, not at all the spiritual. It is most 
true that sentimentalism springs from the former, 
merely and badly aping the latter ; fine flower or 
pinnacle flame-spire of sensualism that it is, could 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 149 

it do Other? — and accompanying the former it 
traverses tracts of desert, here and there couching 
in a garden, catching in one hand at fruits, with 
another at colours ; imagining a secret ahead, and 
goaded by an appetite sustained by sheer gratifi- 
cation. Fiddle in harmonies as it may, it will have 
these gratifications at all costs. Should none be 
discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of De- 
spair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in 
the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-de- 
pendent figures, placarded across the bosom. Dis- 
illusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus. That is 
the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality 
does not light it; evanescent dreams are its oil 
lamps, often with wick askant in the socket. 



A THOUSAND years 1 You may count full many a 
thousand by this route before you are one with 
divine Philosophy. Whereas a single flight of 
brains will reach and embrace her ; give you the 
savour of Truth, the right use of the senses. Real- 
ity's infinite sweetness ; for these things are in 
Philosophy ; and the fiction which is the summary 
of actual Hfe, the within and without of us, is. 



150 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS, 

prose or verse, plodding or soaring, Philosophy's 
elect handmaiden. 



To such an end let us bend our aim to work, 
knowing that every form of labour, even the flim- 
siest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth. 
If in any branch of us we fail in growth, there is, 
you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic 
old monster that waits to pull us down ; certainly 
the branch, possibly the tree ; and for the welfare 
of life we fall. 



You are acutely conscious of yonder old mon- 
ster when he is mouthing at you in politics. Be 
wary of him in the heart ; especially be wary of the 
disrelish of brain-stuff. You must feed on some- 
thing. Matter that is not nourishing to brains can 
help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are 
pitched on rubbish-heaps. Brain-stuff is not lean 
stuff; the brain-stuff of fiction is internal history, 
and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors : 
how deep you will understand when I tell you that 
it is the very football of the holiday afternoon 
imps below. 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 151 

Surely we owe a little to Time, to cheer his 
progress ; a little to posterity and to our country. 
Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning 
breach if only perusers will rally to the philosophic 
standard. They are sick of the v/oodeny puppetry 
they dispense, as on a race-course, to the roaring 
frivolous. 

A GREAT modern writer of clearest eye and 
head, now departed, capable in activity of pre- 
senting thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned 
over his puppetry, that he dared not animate 
them, flesh though they were, with the fires of 
positive brainstuff. He could have done it, and 
he is of the departed ! Had he dared, he would 
(for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art 
in dignity on a level with History to an interest 
surpassing the narrative of public deeds as vividly 
as man's heart and brain in their union excel his 
plain lines of action to eruption. 



Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid in- 
trusions of Philosophy, invoke her presence, I 
pray you. History without her is the skeleton 



152 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS, 

map of events, Fiction a picture of figures mod- 
elled on no skeleton anatomy. But each with 
Philosophy in aid blooms, and is humanly shapely. 
To demand of us truth to nature excluding Phi- 
losophy is really to bid a pumpkin caper. As 
much as legs are wanted for the dance, Philosophy 
is required to make our human nature credible and 
acceptable. Fiction implores you to have a bigger 
heart and take her in with this heavenly preserva- 
tive helpmate, her inspiration and her essence. 



There is a peep-show and a Punch's at the 
corner of every street, one magnifying the lace- 
work of life, another the ventral tumulus, and it is 
these for you or dry bones if you do not open 
to philosophy. 

Beauty is rare ; luckily is it rare, or, judging 
from its effect on men, and the very strongest of 
them, our world would be internally a more dis- 
tracted planet than we see, to the perversion of 
business, courtesy, rights of property, and the rest. 



The weather and women have some resem- 
blance, they say. Is it true that he who reads 
one can read the other? 



X 



^ 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 153 

How odd it is that our men (Englishmen) 
show to such disadvantage in a ball-room. I have 
seen them in danger, and then they shine first of 
any, and one is proud of them. They should 
always be facing the elements or in action. 



Men are the barriers to perfect naturalness, at 
least with girls, I think. 



The burlesque Irishman can't be caricatured. 
Nature strained herself in a fit of absurdity to pro- 
duce him, and all that Art can do is to copy. 



Irishmen, as far as I have seen of them, are, like 
horses, bundles of nerves ; and you must manage 
them, as you do with all nervous creatures, with 
firmness but good temper. You must never get 
into a fury of the nerves yourself with them. Spur 
and whip they don't want ; they '11 be off with you 
in a jiffy if you try it. They want the bridle rein. 
That seems to me the secret of the Irish character. 
We English are not bad horsemen. It 's a won- 
der we blunder so in our management of such a 
people. 



154 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 

A WOMAN, Sir Lakin held, was by nature a mute 
in politics. 

He had neat phrases, opinions in packets. Be- 
yond it, apparently, the world was void of any par- 
ticular interest. 

Why she married him she never told. Possibly 
in amazement at herself subsequently she forgot 
the specific reason. That which weighs heavily in 
youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be 
a trifle under older eyes to blunter senses, a more 
enlightened understanding. 



There were, one hears that there still are, rem- 
nants of the pristine male, who, if resisted in their 
suing, conclude that they are scorned, and it infu- 
riates them ; some also whose '' passion for the 
charmer'^ is an instinct to pull down the standard 
of the sex, by a bully imposition of sheer physical 
ascendency, whenever they see it flying with an air 
of gallant independence ; and some who dedicate 
their lives to a study of the arts of the Lord of 
Reptiles, until they have worked the crisis for a 
display of him in person. 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 155 

She could not excuse her for having married the 
man. Her first and her final impression likened 
him to a house locked up and empty ; a London 
house conventionally fiirnished and decorated by 
the upholsterer, and empty of inhabitants. . . . 
Empty of inhabitants even to the ghost ! Both 
human and spiritual were wanting. The mind con- 
templating him became reflectively stagnant. 



She [Diana] wrote this, which might have a 
secret personal signification : '' We women are the 
verbs passive of the alliance, we have to learn, and 
if we take to activity with the best intentions, we 
conjugate a frightful disturbance. We are to run 
on lines, like the steam-trains, or we come to no 
station, dash to fragments. I have the misfortune 
to know I was born an active. I take my chance.'* 



A WOMAN doubted by her husband is always, and 
even to her champions in the first hour of noxious 
rumour, until they have solidified in confidence 
through service, a creature of the wilds marked for 
our ancient running. Nay, more than a cynical 
world, these latter will be sensible of it. The 



IS6 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

doubt casts her forth, the general yelp drags her 
down ; she runs like the prey of the forest under 
spotting branches ; clear if we can think so, but it 
has to be thought in devotedness, her character is 
abroad. 

The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the 
world is hypocrite ! The world cannot afford to be 
magnanimous. 

Such are men in the world of facts, that when a 
woman steps out of her domestic tangle to assert 
because it is a tangle her rights to partial indepen- 
dence, they sight her as their prey, or at least they 
complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at 
home, a woman ought to bury her wretchedness, 
else may she be assured that not the cleverest, 
wariest guard will cover her character. 



There is perpetually the inducement to act the 
hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a 
woman submits to be the humbly knitting house- 
wife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord ; for 
the world is all-gracious to an hypocrisy that pays 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 157 

homage to the mask of virtue by copying it, — the 
world hostile to the face of an innocence not 
conventionally simpering and quite surprised ; the 
world prefers decorum to honesty. 



English women and men feel towards the quick- 
witted of their species as to aliens, having the 
demerits of aliens, — wordiness, vanity, obscurity, 
shallowness, an empty glitter, the sin of posturing. 
A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a 
foreigner and potentially a criminal. 



Observation is one of the most enduring of the 
pleasures of Hfe. 

" Yes, our lives require compression like roman- 
ces to be interesting, and we object to the process," 
she said. ^^Real happiness is a state of dulness. 
When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal, — 
a thing of the seasons." 



When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky. 



The world of a fluid civilization is perforce 
artificial. 



158 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

Irish anecdotes are always popular in England, 
as promoting besides the wholesome shake of the 
sides a kindly sense of superiority. 



Anecdotes also are portable, unlike the lightning 
flash, which will not go into the pocket ; they can 
be carried home, they are disbursable at other 
tables. These were Diana's weapons. She discov- 
ered the social uses of cheap wit; she laid am- 
bushes for anecdotes, a telling form of it among 
a people of no conversational interlocution, espe- 
cially in the circles depending for dialogue upon 
perpetual fresh supplies of scandal; which have 
plentiful crops, yet not sufficient. 



Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian 
uniform would hardly have won such plaudits as 
her stress of barbaric Oriental splendours evoked 
for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge, — not 
from posterity at least. It is a terrible decree that 
all must act who would prevail ; and the more 
extended the audience, the greater need for the 
mask and buskin. 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 159 

Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charm- 
ing were addressed to the women. Men may be 
counted on for falUng bowled over by a handsome 
face and pointed tongue ; women require some 
wooing from their ensphered and charioted sister, 
particularly if she is clouded ; and old women — 
excellent buttresses — must be suavely courted. 



Few tasks are more difficult than for a young 
woman under a cloud to hoodwink old women of 
the world. They are the prey of financiers ; but 
Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to 
scan their sex in. 



She was a lady of incisive features bound in 
stale parchment. Complexion she had none, but 
she had spotlessness of skin, and sons and daugh- 
ters just resembling her, hke cheaper editions of a 
precious quarto of a perished type. 



Her appearance and her principles fitted her to 
stand for the Puritan rich of the period, emerging 
by the aid of an extending wealth into luxurious 



i6o DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

worldliness, and retaining the maxims of their fore- 
fathers for the discipKne of the poor and erring. 



The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, 
her charm, and her elsewhere offending wit, how- 
ever the case might go. It is chivalrous, but not, 
alas ! inflammable in support of innocence. The 
class below it is governed in estimates of character 
by accepted patterns of conduct ; yet where inno- 
cence under persecution is believed to exist, the 
members animated by that belief can be enthusi- 
astic. Enthusiasm is a heaven-sent steeple-chaser, 
and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers ; it 
is more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to 
communicate its ardour. 



He is not a contemptible man before the world ; 
he is merely a very narrow one under close inspec- 
tion. . . . Husband grew to mean to me stifler, 
lung contractor, iron mask, inquisitor, everything 
anti-natural. . . . He is an upright man; I have 
not seen marked meanness. One might build up a 
respectable figure in negatives. I could add a row 
of noughts to the single number he cherishes 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. i6i 

enough to make a millionaire of him ; but strike 
away the first, the rest are wind. Which signifies 
that if you do not take his estimate of himself you 
will think little of his negative virtues. He is not 
eminently, that is to say, not saliently selfish ; not 
rancorous, not obtrusive — ta-ta-ta. But dull ! dull 
as a woollen night- cap over eyes and ears and 
mouth. 

The English notion of women seems to be that we 
are bom white sheep or black ; circumstances have 
nothing to do with our colour. They dread to 
grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly 
is beyond them. Whether the fiction that their 
homes are purer than elsewhere helps to establish 
the fact, I do not know ; there is a class that do 
live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a 
liking for purity ; but I am sure that their method 
of impressing it on women has the danger of 
things artificial. They narrow their understanding 
of human nature, and that is not the way to im- 
prove the breed. 

'^ I SUPPOSE we women are taken to be the 
second thoughts of the Creator, human nature's 

II 



1 62 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the 
texture," said Diana, " the pretty ornamentation." 



The very young men and the old are our hope 
The middle-aged are hard and fast for existing 
facts. We pick our leaders on the slopes, the 
incline and decline of the mountains, — not on 
the upper table-land midway, where all appears 
to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a 
few excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be lev- 
elled at their leisure ; which induces one to protest 
that the middle-age of men is their time of delusion. 
It is no paradox. They may be publicly useful in 
a small way, I do not deny it at all. They must be 
near the gates of life — the opening or the closing 
— for their minds to be accessible to the urgency 
of the greater questions. 



He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the 
world, and no spiritual distillery of his own. 



To be a girl again was magical. . . . And to be 
a girl with a woman's broader vision and receptive- 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS, 163 

ness of soul, with knowledge of evil and winging to 
ethereal happiness, this was a revelation of our 
human powers. 



When a woman's charm has won half the battle, 
her character is an advancing standard. 



We are much influenced in youth by sleepless 
nights ; they disarm, they predispose us to submit 
to soft occasion; and in our youth occasion is 
always coming. 

Prose can paint evening and moonlight, but 
poets are needed to sing the dawn. That is 
because prose is equal to melancholy stuff. Glad- 
ness requires the finer language. 



We have this power of resisting invasion of the 
poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the blood, 
if we please, though you men may not think that 
we have. 



London, say what we will of it, is after all the 
head of the British giant, and if not the liveliest in 



1 64 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS, 

bubbles, it is past competition the largest broth-pot 
of brains anywhere simmering on the hob : over 
the steadiest of furnaces too. And the oceans and 
the continents, as you know, are perpetual and 
copious contributors, either to the heating appara- 
tus or to the contents of the pot. 

Let grander similes be sought. This one fits for 
the smoky receptacle cherishing millions magnetic 
to tens of millions more, with its caked outside of 
grime, and the inward substance incessantly kicking 
the Hd, prankish but never casting it off. A good 
stew you perceive ; not a parlous boiling. Weak as 
we may be in our domestic cookery, our poKtical 
has been sagaciously adjusted as yet to catch the 
ardours of the furnace without being subject to 
their volcanic activities. 



A WITTY woman is such salt that, where she has 
once been tasted, she must perforce be missed 
more than any of the absent, the dowering heavens 
not having yet showered her like very plentifully 
upon us. 

Lady Watkins's table could dispense with witty 
women, and for that matter witty men. The 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 165 

intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped 
would have clashed. She preferred, as hostess, 
the old legal anecdotes, sure of their laugh, and 
the citations from the manufactories of fun in the 
press, which were current and instantly intelligible 
to all her guests. 



The more I know of the world, the more clearly 
I perceive that its top and bottom sin is cowardice, 
physically and morally alike. . . . We must fawn 
in society. . . . Society is the best thing we have, 
but it is a crazy vessel worked by a crew that for- 
merly practised piracy, and now in expiation pro- 
fesses piety, fearful of a discovered omnipotence 
which is in the image of themselves and captain. 



There was talk in the feminine world — at Lady 
Watkins's assemblies. . . . Our aristocracy, brilliant 
and ancient though it was, merited rebuke. She 
grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof 
were plenty among the frolicsome host just over- 
head, as vexatious as the drawing-room party to 
the lodger in the floor below, who has not received 



1 66 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 

an invitation to partake of the festivities, and is 
required to digest the noise. 



But if ambition is over sensitive, moral indigna- 
tion is ever consolatory, for it plants us on the 
judgment seat. There indeed we may, sitting with 
the very Highest, forget our personal disappoint- 
ments in dispensing reprobation for misconduct, 
however eminent the offenders. 



These book-worm women, whose pride it is to 
fancy that they can think for themselves, have a 
great deal of the heathen in them, as morality 
discovers when it wears the enlistment ribbons and 
applies to them to win recruits for a service under 
the direct blessing of Providence. . . . You sound 
them vainly for manifestation of the commonest 
human sensibilities. They turn over the leaves 
of a Latin book on their laps while you are sup- 
plicating them to assist in a work of charity. 



August is the month of sober maturity and 
majestic foliage, songless, but a crowned and royal 
robed queenly month. 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS, 167 

The Devil, he loudly proclaimed, has a multi- 
plicity of lures, and none more deadly than when 
he baits with a petticoat. 



Of Mrs. Warwick her opinion was formed. She 
would not have charged the individual creature 
with a criminal design ; all she did was to stuff 
the person her virtue abhorred with all the wicked- 
ness of the world, and that is a common process 
in antipathy. 

An astute world, right in the main, owing to 
perceptions based upon brute nature ; utterly astray 
in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count 
of the soul of man or woman. Hence its glee at 
a catastrophe ; its poor stock of mercy. And 
when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the 
honour of the profession, mus decry her as cunning 
beyond aught yet revealed of a serpent sex. 



The world imagines those to be at our nature's 
depths who are imprudent enough to expose its 
muddy shallows. . . . ^' Exhibit humanity as it is 
wallowing, sensual, wicked, behind the mask," a 



1 68 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 

voice called out to Diana ; she was allured by the 
contemplation of the wide-mouthed old dragon 
Ego, whose portrait, decently painted, establishes 
an instant touch of exchange between author and 
public, the latter detected and confessing. Next 
to the pantomime of Humour and Pathos, a cyn- 
ical surgical knife at the human bosom seems the 
surest talisman for this agreeable exchange. 



Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in 
her bosom ; a damsel castigatingly pursued by the 
idea of sex as the direct motive of every act of 
every person surrounding her ; deductively, there- 
fore, that a certain form of the impelling passion, 
mild or terrible or capricious, or it might be less 
pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the 
human couples up to decrepitude, — and she too 
frequently hit the fact to doubt her gift of reading 
into them. 

Lady Pennon hinted " A good deal of what you 
so capitally call ' Green Tea talk * is going on, my 
dear." Diana rephed without pretending to mis- 



DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 169 

understand, " Gossip is a beast of prey that does 
not wait for the death of the creature it devours." 



We women miss life only when we have to con- 
fess we have never met the man to reverence. 



The simphcity of the hfe of labour looked beauti- 
ful. What will not look beautiful contrasted with 
the fly in the web ? 



Gaze on the moral path you should have taken ; 
you are asked for courage to commit a sanctioned 
suicide, by walking back to it stripped — a skele- 
ton self. 

When we are losing balance on a precipice we 
do not think much of the thing we have clutched 
for support. Our balance is restored and we have 
not fallen, — that is the comfortable reflection ; we 
stand as others do, and we will for the future be 
warned to avoid the dizzy stations which cry for 
resources beyond a common equilibrium, and where 
a slip precipitates us to ruin. 



lyo DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS, 

They rose from table at ten, with the satisfaction 
of knowing that they had not argued, had not 
wrangled, had never stagnated, and were digest- 
ingly refreshed; as it should be among grown 
members of the civilized world, who mean to 
practise philosophy, making the hour of the feast 
a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body 
and mind. 



A MIND that after a long season of oblivion in 
pain returns to wakefulness without a keen edge 
for the world, is much in danger of souring per- 
manently. 

She would n't be a bad heroine of romance ! 
He said it derisively of the Romantic. . . . Poor 
Diana was the flecked heroine of Reality; not 
always the same ; not impeccable ; not an igno- 
rant innocent, nor a guileless ; good under good 
leadings ; devoted to the death in a grave crisis ; 
often wrestling with her terrestrial nature nobly; 
and a growing soul ; but not one whose purity was 
carved in marble for the assurance to an English- 
man that his possession of the changeless thing 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 171 

defies time and his fellows, — is the pillow of his 
home and universally enviable. 



Hymeneal rumours are those which mxight be 
backed to run a victorious race with the tale of 
evil future, and clearly for the reason that man's 
livelier half is ever alert to speed them. . . . Man's 
nuptial half is kindlingly concerned in the launch of 
a new couple ; it is the business of the sex ; and 
man himself lends a not unfavouring eye to the 
preparations of the matrimonial vessel for its oily 
descent into the tides, where billows will soon be 
rising, captain and mate soon discussing the fateful 
question of who is commander. We consent, it 
appears, to hope again for mankind ; here is an- 
other chance ! Or else, assuming the happiness of 
the pair, that pomp of ceremonial contrasted with 
the little wind-blown candle they carry between 
them catches at our weaker fibres. After so many 
ships have foundered, some keel up, like poisoned 
fish at the first drink of water, it is a gallant spec- 
tacle, let us avow; and either the world perpet- 
uating it is heroical, or nature incorrigible in the 
species. Marriages are unceasing. Friends do it. 



172 DIANA OF THE CROSS WAYS. 

and enemies ; the unknown contractors of this 
engagement, or armistice, inspire an interest. It 
certainly is both exciting and comforting to hear 
that man and woman are ready to join in a mutual 
affirmative, say Yes together again. It sounds like 
the end of the war. 



They who sow their money for a promising high 
percentage have built their habitations on the sides 
of the most eruptive mountain in Europe, ^tna 
supplies more certain harvests, wrecks fewer vine- 
yards and peaceful dwellings. 



Who can really think, and not think hope- 
fully? . . . When we despair or discolour things it 
is our senses in revolt, and they have made the 
sovereign brain their drudge. I hear you whisper 
with your very breath in my ear, "There is nothing 
the body suffers that the soul may not profit by." 
That is Emmy's history. With that I sail into the 
dark ; it is my promise of the immortal ; teaches 
me to see immortality for us. 



DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS, 173 

True poets and true women have the native 
sense of the divineness of what the world deems 
gross material substance. 



Men unaccustomed to a knot in their system 
find the project of cutting it an extreme relief, 
even when they know that the cut has an edge 
to wound mortally, as well as pacify. 



The discussion closed with the accustomed pro 
and con upon the wart of Cromwell's nose, Real- 
ism rejoicing in it, Idealism objecting. 



My vanity was my chief traitor. Cowardice of 
course played a part. In few things that we do 
where self is concerned will cowardice not be 
found. 



When I think of it I perceive that Patience is 
our beneficent fairy godmother, who brings us 
our harvests in the long result. 



Women who sap the moral laws pull down the 
pillars of the temple on their sex. 



174 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. 

Let us stand aside and meditate on Life. If 
youth could only know, in the season of its reaping 
of pleasures, that it is but sowing doctor's bills. 



Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing 
monotony. 



THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH. 



THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH, 



How charged with language behind him is a 
dog ! Everybody has noticed it. Let a dog turn 
away from a hostile circle, and his crisp and wavy 
tail not merely defends him, it menaces ; it is a 
weapon. Man has no choice but to surge and 
boil or stiffen preposterously. 



The mixture of an idea of public duty with a 
feeling of personal rancour is a strong incentive to 
the pursuit of a stem line of conduct ; and the 
glimmer of self-interest superadded does not check 
the steps of the moraUst. 



Infants are said to have their ideas, and why 
not young ladies? Those who write of their per- 
plexities in descriptions comical in their length are 
unkind to them, by making them appear the sim- 

12 



178 THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH 

plest of the creatures of fiction ; and most of us, 
I am sure, would incline to believe in them if they 
were only some bit more hghtly touched. Those 
troubled sentiments of our young lady of the com- 
fortable classes are quite worthy of mention. Her 
poor little eye, poring, as Httle fish-like as possible, 
upon the intricate, which she takes for the infinite, 
has its place in our history, nor would we any of us 
miss the pathos of it were it not that so large a 
space is claimed for the exposure. 



One of the most difficult lessons for spirited 
young men to learn is, that good jokes are not 
always good policy. They have to be paid for, 
like good dinners, though dinner and joke shall 
seem to have been at some one else's expense. 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 



The art of the pen is to rouse the inward vision, instead 
of labouring with a drop scene brush, as if it were to the 
eye ; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted 
description. That is why the poets, who spring imagination 
with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures. 

Nothing but poetry makes romances possible ; for poetry 
is the everlastingly and embracingly human ; without it, 
your fictions are flat foolishness. 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 



DAWN. 



The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had heaven to 
themselves. Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, 
white shelves, shining ledges, domes and peaks, all 
the towering heights, were in illumination from 
Tivoli into farthest Tyrol ; beyond earth to the 
stricken senses of the gazers. Colour was stead- 
fast on the massive front ranks ; it wavered in the 
remoteness, and was quick and dim as though it 
fell on beating wings : but there too divine colour 
seized and shaped forth solid forms, and thence 
away to others in uttermost distances where the 
incredible flickering gleam of new heights arose 
that soared, or stretched their white uncertain 
curves in sky, like wings traversing infinity. 

Beauchamp's Career. 



1 82 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 



AFTER RAIN. 

Rain had fallen in the night. Here and there 
hung a milk-white cloud with folded sail. The 
southwest left it its bay of blue, and breathed 
below. At moments the fresh scents of herb and 
mould swung richly in warmth. The young beech 
leaves glittered, pools of rain-water made the road- 
ways laugh, the grass banks under hedges rolled 
their intenvoven weeds in cascades of many-shaded 
green to right and left of the pair of dappled ponies, 
and a squirrel ahead, a lark went up a little way to 
ease his heart, closing his wings when the burst was 
over, startled blackbirds darting with a clamour like 
a broken cock-crow looped the wayside woods from 
hazel to oak- scrub ; short flights, quick spirits every- 
where, steady sunshine above. 

February blew southwest for the pairing of the 
birds. A broad, warm wind rolled clouds of every 
ambiguity of form in magnitude over peeping azure, 
or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, 
or piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset, or 
sometimes those daughters of the wind flew linked 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 183 



and low, semi-purple, threatening the shower they 
retained, and teaching gloom to rouse a songful 
nest in the bosom of the viewer. Sometimes they 
were April, variable to soar with rain-skirts and sink 
with sun-shafts. Or they drenched wood and field 
for a day and opened on the high southwestern star. 
Daughters of the wind, but shifty daughters of this 
wind of the dropping suns, they have to be watched 
to be loved in their transformations. 

His elevation above the valley was about the 
knee-cap of Generoso. Waters of past rain-clouds 
poured down the mountain sides like veins of metal, 
here and there flinging off a shower on the busy 
descent ; only dubiously animate in the lack-lustre 
of the huge bulk piled against a yellow east that 
wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets overhead. He 
mounted his path to a level with inviting grass- 
mounds where water circled, running from scoops 
and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his 
fancy calling him to hear them. 

Heights to right and to left, and between them, 
aloft, a sky the rosy wheel-course of the chariot of 



1 84 VIGNETTES IN PROSE, 

morn, and below among the knolls choice of shel- 
tered nook where waters whispered of secrecy to 
satisfy Diana herself. They have that whisper and 
waving of secrecy in secret scenery ; they beckon 
to the bath ; and they conjure classic visions of the 
pudency of the goddess, irate or unsighted. 

Diana of the Crossways. 



HER PICTURE. 

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have 
been held fair among rival damsels. On a magic 
shore, and to a youth educated by a system, strung 
like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be 
guessed, could fly fast and far with her. The soft 
rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes, bore 
witness of the body's virtue and health and happy 
blood even in her bearing. The wide summer hat 
nodding over her forehead to her brows, seemed to 
flow with the flowing heavy curls, and those fire- 
threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves of hair 
call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny 
red-veined torrent down her back almost to her 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 185 

waist : a glorious vision to the youth who embraced 
it as a flower of beauty and read not a feature. 
There were curious features of colour in her face 
for him to have read. Her brows, thick and 
brownish against a soft skin showing the action of 
the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to 
the temples long and level ; you saw that she was 
fashioned to peruse the sights of earth, and by the 
pliabiHty of her brows that the wonderful creature 
used her faculty and was not going to be a statue 
to the gazer. Under the dark thick brows an arch 
of lashes shot out, giving a wealth of darkness to 
the full, frank blue eyes, a mystery of meaning — 
more than brain was ever meant to fathom : richer, 
therefore, than all mortal wisdom to Prince Ferdi- 
nand. For when Nature turns artist and produces 
contrasts of colours on a fair face, where is the 
Sage, or what the Oracle, shall match the depth 

of its lightest look? 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 



To-MORROW the place will have a memory, — the 
river, and the meadow, and the white falling weir : 



1 86 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

his heart will build a temple here ; and the skylark 

will be the high priest, and the old blackbird its 

glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred 

repast of dewberries. To-day the grass is grass ; 

his heart is chased by phantoms and finds rest 

nowhere. Only when the most tender freshness 

of his flower comes across him does he taste a 

moment's calm ; and no sooner does it come than 

it gives place to keen pangs of fear that she may 

not be his forever. 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 



LOVE. 



Away with systems ! Away with a corrupt 
world ! Let us breathe the air of the enchanted 
island. Golden He the meadows ; golden run the 
streams ; red gold is on the pine stems. The 
sun is coming down to earth and walks the fields 
and the waters. The sun is coming down to earth, 
and the fields and the waters shoot to him golden 
shoots. He comes and his heralds run before 
him, and touch the leaves of oaks, and planes, and 
beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder 



VIGNE TTES IN PROSE. i 8 7 

gold ; leaving brightest footprints upon thickly- 
weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper 
bells incline, and bramble shoots wander amid 
moist, rich herbage. The plumes of the wood- 
land are alight ; and beyond them, over the open, 
't is a race with the long-thrown shadows ; a race 
across the heaths and up the hills, till on the far- 
thest bourne of mounted eastern cloud the heralds 
of the sun lay rosy fingers and rest. 

Sweet are the shy recesses of the woodlands. 
The ray treads softly there. A film athwart the 
pathway quivers many-hued against purple shade 
fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery 
ferns. The little brown squirrel drops tail and 
leaps ; the inmost bird is startled to a chance 
tuneless note. From silence into silence things 
move. 

Peeps of the revelling splendour above and 
around enliven the conscious full heart within. 
The flaming west, the crimson heights, shower 
their glories through voluminous leafage. But 
these are bowers where deep bliss dwells, impe- 
rial joy, that owes no fealty to yonder glories, in 
which the young lamb gambols, and the spirits 



1 88 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

of men are glad. Descend, great Radiance ! 
Embrace creation with beneficent fire and pass 
from us ! You and the vice-regal light that suc- 
ceeds to you, and all heavenly pageants, are the 
ministers and slaves of the throbbing contest 
within. 

For this is the home of the enchantment. Here, 
secluded from vexed shores, the prince and prin- 
cess of the island meet ; here like darkling night- 
ingales they sit, and into eyes and ears and hands 
pour endless ever- fresh treasures of their souls. 

Roll on, grinding w^heels of the world ; cries of 
ships going down in a calm, groans of a system 
which will not know its rightful hour of exaltation, 
complain to the Universe. You are not heard here. 

Out in the world there, on the skirts of the 
woodland, a sheep-boy pipes to meditative eve 
on a penny whistle. Love's musical instrument 
is as old, and as poor : it has but two stops ; and 
yet you see the cunning musician does this much 
with it ! 

Other speech they have little ; light foam playing 
upon waves of feeling compact, that bursts only 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 189 

when the sweeping volume is too wild, and is no 
more than their sigh of tenderness spoken. 

Perhaps Love played his tune so well because 
their natures had unblunted edges, and were keen 
for bhss, confiding in it as natural food. To gen- 
tlemen and ladies, he fine-draws upon the viol 
ravishingly; or blows into the mellow bassoon; 
or rouses the heroic ardours of the trumpet ; or it 
may be commands the whole orchestra for them. 
And they are pleased. He is still the cunning 
musician. They languish and taste ecstasy, but it 
is, however sonorous, an earthly concert. For 
them the spheres move not to two notes. They 
have lost or forfeited and never known the first 
supersensual spring of the ripe senses into passion ; 
when they carry the soul with them, and have the 
privileges of spirits to walk disembodied, bound- 
lessly to feel. Or one has it, and the other is a 
dead body. Ambrosia let them eat, and drink the 
nectar ; here sit a couple to whom Love's simple 
bread and water is a finer feast. 

Pipe, happy sheep-boy. Love ! Irradiated angels, 
unfold your wings and lift your voices ! 



190 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

They have outflown Philosophy. Their instinct 
has shot beyond the ken of Science. They were 
made for their Eden. 

They beheve that the angels have been busy 
about them from their cradles. The celestial hosts 
have worthily striven to bring them together. And 
O victory ! O wonder ! after trial and pain, and 
difficulties exceeding, the celestial hosts have suc- 
ceeded ! 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 



NATURE SPEAKS TO RICHARD FEVEREL. 

The moon was surpassingly bright ; the summer 
air heavy and still. He left the high-road and 
pierced into the forest. His walk was rapid ; the 
leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks ; the dead 
leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet. 

An oppressive slumber hung over the forest 
branches. In the dells and on the heights was the 
same dead heat. Here when the brook tinkled it 
was no cool-Hpped sound, but metallic, and without 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 191 

the spirit of water. Yonder, in a space of moon- 
light on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to 
sight and feeling. No haze spread around. The 
valleys were clear, defined to the shadows of their 
verges ; the distances sharply distinct, and with 
the colours of day but slightly softened. Richard 
beheld a roe moving across a slope of sward far 
out of rifle-mark. The breathless silence was sig- 
nificant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue 
heaven. Tongue out of mouth trotted the little 
dog after him ; couched panting when he stopped 
an instant ; rose weariedly when he started afresh. 
Now and then a large night-moth flitted through 
the dusk of the forest. 

On a barren comer of the wooded highland look- 
ing inland stood gray topless ruins set in nettles 
and rank grass-blades. Richard mechanically sat 
down on the crumbHng flints to rest, and listened 
to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet 
were emerald lights ; hundreds of glow-worms stud- 
ded the dark dry ground. 

He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His 
energies were expended in action. He sat as a 
part of the ruins and the moon turned his shadow 



192 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

westward from the south. Overhead, as she de- 
chned, long ripples of silver cloud were impercep- 
tibly stealing toward her. They were the van of a 
tempest. He did not observe them or the leaves 
beginning to chatter. When he again pursued his 
course with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain 
appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in 
his mind to scale it. He got no nearer to the base 
of it for all his vigorous outstepping. The ground 
began to dip ; he lost sight of the sky. Then heavy 
thunder-drops struck his cheek, the leaves were 
singing, the earth breathed, it was black before him 
and behind. All at once the thunder spoke. The 
mountain he had marked was bursting over him. 
Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw 
the country at the foot of the hills to the bounding 
Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished. Then there 
were pauses; and the lightning seemed like the 
eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of 
heaven, each alternately addressing him, filling 
him with awful rapture. Alone there — sole human 
creature among the grandeurs and mysteries of 
storm — he felt the representative of his kind, and 
his spirit rose, and marched, and exulted, let it be 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 193 

glory, let it be ruin ! Lower down the lightened 
abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash ; then white 
thrusts of light were darted from the sky, and great 
curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, 
were supernaturally agitated and vanished. Then 
a shrill song roused in the leaves and the herbage. 
Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and 
heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty force of 
water satisfied the desire of the earth. Even in 
this, drenched as he w^as by the first outpouring, 
Richard had a savage pleasure. Keeping in motion, 
he was scarcely conscious of the wet, and the grate- 
ful breath of the weeds in his nostrils was refresh- 
ing. Suddenly he stopped short, lifting a curious 
nostril. He fancied he smelt meadow-sweet. He 
had never seen the flower in Rhineland, — never 
thought of it ; and it could hardly be met with in 
a forest. He was sure he smelt it, fresh in dews. 
His little companion wagged a miserable wet tail 
some way in advance. He went on slowly, think- 
ing indistinctly. After two or three steps he 
stooped and stretched out his hand to feel for 
the flower, having he knew not why a strong wish 
to verify its growth there. Groping about, his hand 

13 



194 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

encountered something warm that started at the 
touch, and he, with the instinct we have, seized it 
and Hfted it to look at it. The creature was very 
small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes, now 
accustomed to the darkness, Vv^ere able to discern 
it for what it was, a tiny leveret, and he supposed 
that the dog had probably frightened its dam just 
before he found it. He put the little thing on one 
hand in his breast and stepped out rapidly as 
before. 

The rain was now steady : from every tree a 
fountain poured. So cool and easy had his mind 
become that he was speculating on what kind of 
shelter the birds could find, and how the butterflies 
and moths saved their coloured wings from wash- 
ing. Folded close, they might hang under a leaf, 
he thought. Lovingly he looked into the dripping 
darkness of the coverts on each side, as one of 
their children. Then he was musing on a strange 
sensation he experienced. It ran up one arm with 
an indescribable thrill, but communicated nothing 
to his heart. It was purely physical, ceased for a 
time, and recommenced, till he had it all through 
his blood wonderfully thrilling. He grew aware 



VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 195 

that the little thing he carried in his breast was 
licking his hand there. The small rough tongue 
going over and over the palm of his hand pro- 
duced this strange sensation he felt. Now that 
he knew the cause, the marvel ended ; but now 
that he knew the cause, his heart was touched, and 
made more of it. The gentle scraping continued 
without intermission as on he walked. What did 
it say to him ? Human tongue could not have said 
so much then. 

A pale gray light on the skirts of the flying tem- 
pest displayed the dawn. Richard was walking 
hurriedly. The green drenched weeds lay about in 
his path, bent thick, and the forest drooped glim- 
meringly. Impelled as a man who feels a revela- 
tion mounting obscurely to his brain, Richard was 
passing one of those little forest chapels hung with 
votive wreaths, where the peasant halts to kneel 
and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight it stood, rain- 
drops pattering round it. He looked within, and 
saw the Virgin holding her Child. He moved by. 
But not many steps had he gone ere his strength 
was out of him, and he shuddered. 

What was it? He asked not. He was in other 



196 VIGNETTES IN PROSE. 

hands. Vivid as lightning the spirit of Life illu- 
mined him. He felt in his heart the cry of his 
child, his darling's touch. With shut eyes he saw 
them both. They drew him from the depths ; they 
led him, a blind and tottering man. And as they 
led him, he had a sense of purification so sweet he 
shuddered again and again. 

When he looked out from his trance on the 
breathing world, the small birds hopped and 
chirped ; warm fresh sunlight was over all the 
hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering 
a plain clothed with ripe corn under a spacious 

morning sky. 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 



/" 



SONNETS. 



" An inspiration caught from dubious hues 
Filled him, and mystic wrynesses he chased/ 



SONNETS. 



MY THEME. 

Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt : 
The song of gladness one straight bolt can check. 
But I have never stood at Fortune's beck : 
Were she and her light crew to run atilt 
At my poor holding, little would be spilt ; 
Small were the praise for singing o'er that wreck. 
Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck ; 
He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt. 
Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell 
With other than those votaries she deals 
The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift. 
I say but that this love of Earth reveals 
A soul beside our own to quicken, quell, 
Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift. 



200 SONNETS. 



THE WORLD'S ADVANCE. 

Judge mildly the tasked world ; and disincline 

To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack. 

You have perchance observed the inebriate's track 

At night when he has quitted the inn-sign : 

He plays diversions on the homeward line, 

Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack : 

A hedge may take him, but he turns not back. 

Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine. 

'^Spiral," the memorable Lady terms 

Our mind's ascent : our world's advance presents 

That figure on a flat ; the way of worms. 

Cherish the promise of its good intents, 

And warn it, not one instinct to efface 

Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place. 



THE DISCIPLINE OF WISDOM. 

Rich labour is the struggle to be wise. 
While we make sure the struggle cannot cease. 
Else better were it in some bower of peace 
Slothful to swing, contending with the flies. 



SONNETS. 20 1 



You point at Wisdom fixed on lofty skies, 

As mid barbarian hordes a sculptured Greece : 

She falls. To live and shine, she grows her fleece, 

Is shorn, and rubs with follies and with lies. 

So following her, your hewing may attain 

The right to speak unto the mute, and shun 

That sly temptation of the illumined brain. 

Deliveries oracular, self-spun. 

Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain 

To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun. 



APPRECIATION. 

Earth was not earth before her sons appeared, 

Nor Beauty Beauty ere young Love was born : 

And thou when I lay hidden wert as morn 

At city windows, touching eyelids bleared ; 

To none by her fresh wingedness endeared ; 

Unwelcome unto revellers outworn. 

I the last echoes of Diana's horn 

In woodland heard, and saw thee come, and 

cheered. 
No longer wert thou then mere light, fair soul ! 



202 SONNETS. 



And more than simple duty moved thy feet. 
New colours rose in thee, from fear, from shame, 
From hope, effused : though not less pure a scroll 
May men read on the heart I taught to beat : 
That change in thee, if not thyself, I claim. 



EARTH'S SECRET. 

Not solitarily in fields we find 

Earth's secret open, though one page is there ; 

Her plainest, such as children spell, and share 

With bird and beast ; raised letters for the blind. 

Not where the troubled passions toss the mind. 

In turbid cities, can the key be bare. 

It hangs for those who hither thither fare, 

Close interthreading nature with our kind. 

They, hearing History speak, of what men were, 

And have become, are wise. The gain is great 

In vision and solidity ; it lives. 

Yet at a thought of life apart from her, 

SoUdity and vision lose their state, 

For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives. 



SONNETS. 203 



SENSE AND SPIRIT. 



The senses loving Earth or well or ill, 
Ravel yet more the riddle of our lot. 
The mind is in their trammels, and lights not 
By trimming fear-bred tales ; nor does the will 
To find in nature things which less may chill 
An ardour that desires, unknowing what. 
Till we conceive her living we go distraught, 
At best but circle-windsails of a mill. 
Seeing she lives, and of her joy of life 
Creatively has given us blood and breath 
For endless war and never wound unhealed, 
The gloomy Wherefore of our battle-field 
Solves in the Spirit, wrought of her through strife 
To read her own and trust her down to death. 



POEMS. 



POEMS, 



LOVE IN THE VALLEY. 

Under yonder beech tree single on the green- 
sward, 
Couched with her arms behind her golden head, 
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, 
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. 
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her. 
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow, 
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace 

me ; 
Then would she hold me and never let me go ? 

Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, 
Swift as the swallow along the river's light 
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored wing- 
lets, 
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight ; 



2o8 POEMS. 

Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine- 
tops, 
Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, 
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, — 
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won ! 

When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the 

window 
Turns grave eyes craving light, released from 

dreams, 
Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily 
Bursting out of bed in havens of the streams. 
When from bed she rises clothed from neck to 

ankle 
In her long night-gown sweet as boughs of May, 
Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily 
Pure from the night, and splendid for the day. 

Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof 
Thro' the long noon coo, crooning thro' the coo. 
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy road- 
way 
Sometimes pipes a chaffinch ; loose droops the 
blue. 



POEMS. 209 

Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river, 
Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly : 
Nowhere is she seen ; and if I see her nowhere, 
Lightning may come, straight rains, and tiger sky. 

Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April 

Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, 

you. 
Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the sky-fields. 

Youngest green transfused in silver shining through ; 

Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry, — 

Fair as in image my seraph love appears. 

Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids, 

Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears. 

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, 
I would speak my heart out ; heaven is my need. 
Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood, 
Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed ; 
Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October, 
Streaming like the flag-reed southwest blown, 
Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam, 
All seem to know what is for heaven alone. 



14 



210 POEMS, 



FRANCE. — DECEMBER, 1870. 

I. 

We look for her that sunUke stood 

Upon the forehead of our day, 

An orb of nations, radiating food 

For body and for mind ahvay ; 

Where is the shape of glad array ; 

The nervous hands, the front of steel, 

The clarion tongue ? Where is the bold, proud face ? 

We see a vacant place, 

We hear an iron heel. 

II. 

O she that made the brave appeal 
For manhood when our time was dark, 
And from our fetters drove the spark 
Which was as lightning to reveal 
New seasons, with the swifter play 
Of pulses, and benigner day, — 
She that divinely shook the dead 
From living man, that stretched ahead 
Her resolute forefinger straight. 
And marched toward the gloomy gate 



POEMS, 2 1 1 



Of earth's Untried, gave note, and in 

The good name of Humanity 

Called forth the daring vision ! She, 

She likewise half-corrupt of sin, 

Angel and Wanton ! Can it be ? 

Her star has foundered in eclipse, 

The shriek of madness on her lips ; 

Shreds of her, and no more, we see. 

There is horrible convulsion, smothered din. 

As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free 1 

III. 
Look not for spreading boughs 
On the riven forest tree. 
Look down where deep in blood and mire 
Black thunder plants his feet and ploughs 
The soil for ruin ; that is France ; 
Still thrilling like a lyre. 
Amazed to shivering discord from a fall 
Sudden as that the lurid hosts recall 
Who met in heaven the irreparable mischance, 

O, that is France ! 
The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss, 
The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss, 



2 1 2 POEMS, 



Breasts that a sighing world inspire, 
And laughter-dimpled countenance, 
Where soul and senses caught desire ! 

IV. 

Ever invoking fire from Heaven, the fire 
Has grasped her, unconsumable, but firamed 
For all the ecstasies of suffering dire : 
Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed : 
Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark 
For outrage ; Mother of Luxury stripped stark : 
Mother of Heroes, bondsmen : thro' the rains, 
Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains ! 
Fond Mother of her martial youth ; they pass. 
Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass ! 
Mother of Honour, and dishonoured : Mother 
Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays 
Her victor, and be fountain of his praise. 
Is there another curse ? There is another. 
Compassionate her madness ; is she not 
Mother of Reason ? she that sees them mown 
Like grass, her young ones ! Yea, in the low groan 
And under the fixed thunder of this hour 
Which holds the animate world in one foul blot 



POEMS. 213 



Tranced circumambient, while relentless Power 
Beaks at her heart and claws her limbs down- 
thrown, 
She, with the plunging lightnings overshot, 
With madness for an armour against pain. 
With milkless breasts for little ones athirst. 
And round her all her noblest dying in vain, 
Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed. 
To feel, to see, to justify the blow; 
Chamber to chamber of her sequent brain 
Gives answer to the cause of her great woe, 
Inexorably echoing thro' the vaults, 
" T is thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow : 
This is the sum of self-absolved faults.'* 
Doubt not that thro' her grief, with sight supreme. 
Thro' her delirium and despair's last dream. 
Thro' pride, thro' bright illusion, and the brood 
Bewildering of her various Motherhood, 
The high strong life within her, tho' she bleeds. 
Traces the letters of returned misdeeds. 
She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late. 
Bears this fierce crop ; and she discerns her fate 
From origin to agony, and on 
As far as the wave washes long and wan 



2 14 POEMS. 



Off one disastrous impulse : for of waves 
Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves 
Blown rolling to the sunset from the dawn. 

V. 

Ah, what a dawn of splendour, when her sowers 
Went forth and bent the necks of populations, 
And of their terrors and humiliations 
Wove her the starry wTeath that earthward lowers 
Now in the figure of a burning yoke ! 
Her legions traversed North and South and East, 
Of triumiph they enjoyed the glutton's feast : 
They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak, 
They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalp 
The icy precipices, and clove sheer through 
The heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp, 
Emerging not as men whom mortals knew. 
They were the earthquake and the hurricane, 
The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight, 
Plagues of the revel : they were Deluge rain, 
And dreaded Conflagration, lawless might. 
Death writes a reeling line along the snows. 
Where under frozen mists they may be tracked, 
Who men and elements provoked to foes, 



POEMS. 215 



And Gods : they were of God and Beast compact : 
Abhorred of all. Yet how they sucked the teats 
Of Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam, 
Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme. 
Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth 

forgets. 
The gay young generations mask her grief; 
Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf. 
Forgetful is green earth ; the Gods alone 
Remember everlastingly : they strike 
Remorselessly, and ever like for like, 
By their great memories the Gods are known. 

VI. 

They are with her now, and in her ears, and known. 
T is they that cast her to the dust for Strength, 
Their slave, to feed on her fair body's length, 
That once the sweetest and the proudest shone ; 
Scoring for hideous dismemberment 
Her hmbs, as were the anguish- taking breath 
Gone out of her in the insufferable descent 
From her high chieftainship ; as were she death 
Who hears a voice of Justice, feels the knife 
Of torture, drinks all ignominy of life. 



2i6 POEMS. 



They are with her, and the painful Gods might 

weep, 
If ever rain of tears came out of heaven 
To flatter Weakness and bid Conscience sleep, 
Viewing the woe of this Immortal, driven 
For the soul's life to drain the maddening cup 
Of her own children's blood implacably : 
Unsparing even as they to furrow up 
The yellow land to likeness of a sea : 
The bountiful fair land of vine and grain. 
Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots, 
Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits ; 
Furrowed to likeness of the dim gray main 
Behind the black obliterating cyclone. 

VII. 

Behold, the Gods are with her, and are known. 

Whom they abandon misery persecutes 

No more : them half-eyed apathy may loan 

The happiness of pitiable brutes. 

Whom the just Gods abandon have no light. 

No ruthless light of introspective eyes 

That in the midst of misery scrutinize 

The heart and its iniquities outright. 



POEMS. 2 I 7 



They rest, they smile and rest ; have earned per- 
chance 
Of ancient service quiet for a term ; 
Quiet of old men dropping to the worm ; 
And so goes out the soul. But not of France. 
She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries, 
For fearfully their loosened hands chastize, 
And icily they watch the rod's caress 
Ravage her flesh from scourges merciless, 
But she, inveterate of brain, discerns 
That Pity has as little place as Joy 
Among their roll of gifts ; for Strength she yearns, 
For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy. 
Lo, Strength is of the plain root Virtues born : 
Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn, 
Train by endurance, by devotion shape. 
Strength is not won by miracle or rape. 
It is the offspring of the modest years. 
The gift of sire to son, thro' those firm laws 
Which we name Gods ; which are the righteous 

cause, 
The cause of man, and manhood's ministers. 
Could France accept the fables of her priests. 
Who blest her banners in this game of beasts, 



2i8 POEMS. 



And now bid hope that Heaven will intercede 

To violate its laws in her sore need, 

She would find comfort in their opiates : 

Mother of Reason ! Can she cheat the Fates ? 

Would she, the champion of the open mind, 

The Omnipotent's prime gift, — the gift of growth, — 

Consent even for a night-time to be blind, 

And sink her soul on the delusive sloth, 

For fruits ethereal and material, both. 

In peril of her place among mankind ? 

The Mother of the many Laughters might 

Call one poor shade of laughter in the light 

Of her unwavering lamp, to mark what things 

The world puts faith in, careless of the truth : 

What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings. 

Attached by credence, we appear in sooth, 

Demanding intercession, direct aid. 

When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade ! 

She s^\Tlng the sword for centuries ; in a day 
It sHpped her, like a stream cut off from source. 
She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray, 
Clamoured of treachery, and had recourse 
To drunken outcries in her dream that Force 



POEMS. 219 

Needed but hear her shoutmg to obey. 

Was she not formed to conquer? The bright 

plumes 
Of crested vanity shed graceful nods : 
Transcendent in her foundries, Arts, and looms, 
Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods ? 
Her faith was on her battle-roll of names 
Sheathed in the records of old war ; with dance 
And song she thrilled her warriors and her dames, 
Embracing her Dishonourer ; gave him France 
From head to foot, France present and to come, 
So she might hear the trumpet and the drum — 
Bellona and Bacchante ! — rushing forth 
On yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North. 

n 

Inveterate of brain, well knows she w^hy 
Strength failed her, faithful to himself the first : 
Her dream is done, and she can read the sky, 
And she can take into her heart the worst 
Calamity to drug the shameful thought 
Of days that made her as the man she served, 
A name of terror, but a thing unnerved : 
Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought, 
She for dominion, he to patch a throne. 



2 20 POEMS, 



VIII. 

Henceforth of her the Gods are known, 
Open to them her breast is laid. 
Inveterate of brain, heart vaHant, 
Never did fairer creature pant 
Before the altar and the blade ! 

IX. 

Swift fall the blows, and men upraid, 
And friends give echo blunt and cold, 
The echo of the forest to the axe 
Within her are the fires that wax 
For resurrection from the mould. 

X. 

She snatched at heaven's flame of old, 

And kindled nations : she was weak : 

Frail sister of her heroic prototype, 

The man ; for sacrifice unripe. 

She too must fill a Vulture's beak. 

Deride the vanquished, and acclaim 

The conqueror, who stains her fame. 

Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim 

Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe. 



POEMS. 22 1 



XL 

She shall rise worthier of her prototype 
Thro' her abasement deep : the pain that runs 
From nerve to nerve some victory achieves. 
They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn leaves 
Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons ! 
And of their death her life is : of their blood 
From many streams now urging to a flood, 
No more divided, France shall rise afresh. 
Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh, — 
The lesson writ in red since first Time ran 
A hunter hunting down the beast in man : 
That till the chasing out of its last vice, 
The Flesh were fashioned but for sacrifice. 

Immortal Mother of a mortal host ! 
Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay. 
Wounds that bring death but take not life away ! 
Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast. 
Hearken, and loathe that music evermore ! 
I Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and 

shame ; 
The torture lurks in them, with them the blame 



222 POEMS. 



Shall pass to leave thee purer than before ; 
Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came, 
For what, and of the abominable name 
Of her who in imperial beauty wore. 

O Mother of a fated fleeting host 

Conceived in the past days of sin, and bom 

Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn, 

Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost. 

Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim 

With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds 

Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons : 

Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds 

Each new discernment of the undying ones. 

Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide 

Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll ; 

These ashes have the lesson for the soul. 

" Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride, 

Strip oif thy Luxury ; that thou may'st live • 

Die to thyself," they say, "as we have died 

From dear existence, and the foe forgive. 

Nor pray for aught save in our little space 

To warm good seed to greet the fair Earth's face." 

O Mother ! take their counsel, and so shall 



POEMS. 223 



The broader world breathe in on this thy home, 

Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome, 

Strength give thee, like an ocean's vast expanse 

Off mountain cliffs, the generations all, 

Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam. 

But as a river forward. Soaring France ! 

Now is Humanity on trial in thee : 

Now may'st thou gather human kind in fee : 

Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll ; 

Make of calamity thine aureole, 

And bleeding lead us thro' the troubles of the sea. 



MEN AND MAN. 

I. 

Men the Angels eyed ; 

And here they were wild waves, 

And there as marsh descried. 

Men the Angels eyed. 

And liked the picture best 

Where they were greenly dressed 

In brotherhood of graves. 



2 24 POEMS. 



II. 

Man the Angels marked : 
He led a host through murk, 
On fearful seas embarked, 
Man the Angels marked ; 
To think without a nay, 
That he was good as they, 
And help him at his work. 

III. 
Man and Angels, ye 
A sluggish fen shall drain, 
Shall quell a warring see. 
Man and Angels, ye, 
Whom stain of strife befouls, 
A light to kindle souls 
Bear radiant in the stain. 



THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN. 

Enter these enchanted woods, 

You who dare. 
Nothing harms beneath the leaves 
More than waves a swimmer cleaves. 



POEMS. 225 



Toss your heart up with the lark, 
Foot at peace with mouse and worm, 

Fair yon fare 
Only at a dread of dark 
Quaver, and they quit their form : 
Thousand eyeballs under hoods 
Have you by the hair. 
Enter these enchanted woods, 

You who dare. 

On the surface she will witch. 
Rendering Beauty yours, but gaze 
Under, and the soul is rich ' 

Past computing, past amaze. 
Then is courage that endures 
Even her awful tremble yours. 
Then, the reflex of that Fount 
Spied below, with Reason mount 
Lordly and a quenchless force, 
Lighting Pain to its mad source, 
Scaring Fear till Fear escapes. 
Shot through all its phantom shapes. 
Then your spirit will perceive 
Fleshly seed of fleshly sins ; 
IS 



2 26 POEMS. 



When the passions interweave, 
How the serpent tangle spins 
Of the sense of Earth misprised 
Brainlessly unrecognized ; 
She being Spirit in her clods, 
Footway to the God of Gods. 
Then for you are pleasures pure. 
Sureties as the stars are sure : 
Not the wanton beckoning flags 
Which, of flattery and delight, 
Wag to the grim Habit-Hags 
Riding souls of men to night ; 
Pleasures that through blood run sane. 
Quickening spirit from the brain. 
Each of each in sequent birth. 
Blood and brain and spirit, three 
(Say the deepest gnomes of Earth) 
Join for true felicity. 
Are they parted, then expect 
Some one sailing will be wrecked. 



POEMS. 227 



THE LARK ASCENDING. 

He rises and begins to round, 
He drops the silver chain of sound 
Of many hnks without a break 
In chirrup, whistle, slur, and shake. 
All intervolved, and spreading wide, 
Like water-dimples down a tide. 
Where ripple ripple overcurls 
And eddy into eddy whirls. 

For, singing till his heaven fills, 

'T is love of earth that he instils, 

And ever winging up and up 

Our valley is his golden cup. 

And he the wine which overflows 

To Hft us with him as he goes : 

The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine. 

He is, the hills, the human line. 

The meadows green, the fallows brown, 

The dreams of labour in the town ; 

He sings the sap, the quickened veins. 

The wedding song of sun and rains 



2 28 POEMS. 



He is, the dance of children, thanks 
Of sowers, shoot of primrose banks, 
And eye of violets while they breathe ; 
All these the circling song will wreathe, 
And you shall hear the herb and tree, 
The better heart of men shall see, 
Shall feel celestially, as long 
As you crave nothing save the song. 

Was never voice of ours could say 

Our inmost in the sweetest way 

Like yonder voice aloft, and link 

All hearers in the song they drink ; 

Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, 

Our passion is too full in flood. 

We want the key of his wild note 

Of truthful in a tuneful throat. 

The song seraphically free 

Of taint of personality. 

So pure that it salutes the suns. 

The voice of one for millions 

In whom the millions rejoice 

For giving them one spirit voice. 



POEMS. 229 



AUTUMN EVEN-SONG. 

The long cloud edged with streaming gray, 

Soars from the west ; 
The red leaf mounts with it away, 

Showing the nest 
A blot among the branches bare : 
There is a cry of outcasts in the air. 

Swift little breezes, darting chill. 

Part down the lake ; 
A crow flies from the yellow hill, 

And in its wake 
A baffled line of labouring rooks ; 
Steel-surfaced to the light the river looks. 

Pale the rain-rutted roadways shine 

In the green light, 
Behind the cedar and the pine : 

Come, thundering night ! 
Blacken broad earth with hoards of storm ! 
For me yon valley-cottage beckons warm. 



230 POEMS. 



BY THE ROSANNA. 

To F. M. 

Stanza-Thai, Tyrol. 
The old gray Alp has caught the cloud 
And the torrent river sings aloud ; 
The glacier- green Rosanna sings 
An organ song of its upper springs, 
Foaming under the tiers of pine. 
I see it dash down the dark ravine, 
And it tumbles the rocks in boisterous play, 
With an earnest will to find its way. 

• •••*•• 
A chain of foam from end to end, 
And a solitude so deep, my friend, 
You may forget that man abides 
Beyond the great mute mountain- sides. 
Yet to me, in this high-walled soHtude 
Of river and rock and forest rude, 
The roaring voice through the long white chain 
Is the voice of the world of bubble and brain. 

I find it when I sought it least ; 

I sought the mountain and the beast, 



POEMS. 

The young thin air that knits the nerves, 
The chamois ledge, the snowy curves ; 
Earth in her whiteness looking bold 
To Heaven forever as of old. 

And lo, if I translate the sound 
Now thundering in my ears around 
'T is London rushing down a hill : 
Life or London, — which you will I 



231 



ODE 

To THE Spirit of Earth in Autumn. 

Fair mother Earth lay on her back last night 
To gaze her fill on Autumn's sunset skies, 
When at a waning of the fallen light 
Sprang realms of rosy fruitage o'er her eyes. 
A lustrous heavenly orchard hung the West, 
Wherein the blood of Eden bloomed again ; 
Red were the myriad cherub mouths that pressed 
Among the clusters, rich with song, full fain. 
But dumb, because that overmastering spell 
Of rapture held them dumb, then, here and there. 



232 POEMS. 

A golden harp lost strings ; a crimson shell 

Burnt gray ; and sheaves of lustre fell to air. 

The illimitable eagerness of hue 

Bronzed, and the beamy winged bloom that flew 

Mid those bunched fruits and thronging figures failed. 

A green- edged lake of saffron touched the blue 

With isles of fireless purple lying through, 

And Fancy on that lake to seek lost treasures sailed. 

Not long the silence followed 

The voice that issues from thy breast, 

O glorious South- West, 

Along the gloom-horizon holloa'd, 

Warning the valleys with a mellow roar 

Thro' flapping wings ; then sharp the woodland bore 

A shudder, and a noise of hands ; 

A thousand horns from some far vale 

In ambush sounding on the gale. 

Forth from the cloven sky came bands 

Of revel-gathering spirits ; trooping down. 

Some rode the tree-tops ; some on torn cloud-strips 

Burst screaming thro' the lighted town : 

And scudding seaward, some fell on big ships, 

Or mounting the sea-horses blew 



POEMS. 233 



Bright foam- flakes on the black review 
Of heaving hulls and burying beaks. 

• •••••< 

Night on the rolling foliage fell ! 
But I, who love old hymning night, 
And know the Dryad voices well, 
Discerned them as their leaves took flight. 
Like souls to wander after death : 
Great armies in imperial dyes. 
And mad to tread the air, and rise, 
The savage freedom of the skies 
To taste before they rot. And here. 
Like frail white-bodied girls in fear. 
The birches swung from shrieks to sighs ; 
The aspens, laughers at a breath. 
In showering spray-falls mixed their cries. 
Or raked a savage ocean-strand 
With one incessant drowning screech. 
Here stood a solitary beech. 
That gave its gold v/ith open hand 
And all its branches, toning chill. 
Did seem to shut their teeth right fast. 
To shriek more mercilessly shrill 
And match the fierceness of the blast. 



234 POEMS. 



Oh, mother Nature ! teach me, hke thee, 

To kiss the season, and shun regrets. 

And am I more than the mother who bore. 

Mock me not with thy harmony ! 

Teach me to blot regrets. 

Great Mother ! me inspire 

With faith that forward sets 

But feeds the Hving fire. 

Faith that never frets 

For vagueness in the form. 

In Hfe, O keep me warm ! 

For what is human grief ? 

And what do men desire ? 

Teach me to feel myself the tree, 

And not the withered leaf, 

Fixed am I, and await the dark to be ! 

And O, green bounteous earth ! 
Bacchante Mother ! stem to those 
Who live not in thy heart of mirth ; 
Death shall I shrink from, loving thee ? 
Into the breast that gives the rose, 
Shall I with shuddering fall? 



POEMS. 235 

Earth, the mother of all, 
Moves on her steadfast way. 
Gathering, flinging, sowing. 
Mortals, we live in her day, 
She in her children is growing. 

She can lead us, only she, 

Unto God's footstool, whither she reaches : 

Loved, enjoyed, her gifts must be ; 

Reverenced the truths she teaches. 

Ere a man may hope that he 

Ever can attain the glee 

Of things without a destiny ! 

And may not men to this attain ? 

That the joy of motion, the rapture of being, 

Shall throw strong light when their season is fleeing. 

Nor quicken aged blood in vain, 

At the gates of the vault, on the verge of the plain ? 

Life thoroughly lived is a fact in the brain, 

While eyes are left for seeing. 

Behold, in yon stripped Autumn, shivering gray. 
Earth knows no desolation. 



236 POEMS, 



She smells regeneration 

In the moist breath of decay. 

Prophetic of the coming joy and strife, 
Like the wild western war-chief sinking 
Calm to the end he eyes unblinking, 
Her voice is jubilant in ebbing life. 



SPRING. 

The day was a van-bird of summer; the robin 

still piped, but the blue, 
A warm and dreamy palace with voices of larks 

ringing through, 
Looked down as if wistfully eying the blossoms 

that fell from its lap ; 
A day to sweeten the juices, — a day to quicken 

the sap ! 
All round the shadowy orchard sloped meadows 

in gold, and the dear 

Shy violets breathed their hearts out, — the maiden 

breath of the year ! 

Grandfather Bridgeman. 



POEMS, 237 



MODERN LOVE. 

She issues radiant from her dressing-room 

Like one prepared to scale an upper sphere 

By stirring up a lower, much I fear ! 

How deftly that oiled barber lays his bloom ! 

That long-shanked dapper Cupid with frisked curls 

Can make known women torturingly fair ; 

The gold- eyed serpent dwelling in rich hair 

Awakes beneath his magic whisks and twirls. 

His art can take the eyes from out my head 

Until I see with eyes of other men. 

Out in the yellow meadows, when the bee 

Hums by us with the honey of the spring, 

And showers of sweet notes from the larks on wing 

Are dropping like a noon-dew, wander we. 

Or is it now ? Or was it then ? For now, 

As then, the larks from running rings send showers ; 

The golden foot of May is on the flowers. 

And friendly shadows dance upon her brow. 

What 's this, when Nature swears there is no change 

To challenge eyesight? Now, as then, the grace 



238 POEMS. 



Of Heaven seems holding Earth in its embrace, 
Nor eyes, nor heart as she to feel it strange ? 

" I play for Seasons ; not Eternities ! " 

Says Nature, laughing on her way. ** So must 

All those whose stake is nothing more than 

dust ! '' 
And lo, she wins, and of her harmonies 
She is full sure ! Upon her dying rose 
She drops a look of fondness, and goes by, 
Scarce any retrospection in her eye ; 
For she the laws of growth most deeply knows, 
Whose hands bear here a seed-bag, there an urn. 
Pledged she herself to aught, 't would mark her end ! 
This lesson of our only visible friend 
Can we not teach our foolish hearts to learn? 

At dinner she is hostess, I am host. 

Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps 

The Topic over intellectual deeps 

In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost. 

With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball : 

It is in truth a most contagious game ; 

Hiding the Skeleton shall be its name. 



POEMS, 239 



Such play as this the devils might appal ! 
But here *s the greater wonder ; in that we, 
Enamoured of our acting and our wits, 
Admire each other like true hypocrites. 
Warm-lighted glances, Love's Ephemerae, 
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine. 
We waken envy of our happy lot. 
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot. 
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light 
shine ! 

What are we first ? First animals ; and next 

Intelligences at a leap ; on whom 

Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb. 

And all that draweth on the tomb for text. 

Into this state comes Love, the crowning sun ; 

Beneath whose light the shadow loses form. 

We are the lords of life, and life is warm. 

Intelligence and instinct now are one 

But Nature says : '' My children most they seem 

When they least know me ; therefore I decree 

That they shall suffer." Swift doth young Love 

flee ; 
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream. 



240 POEMS. 



How many a thing which we cast to the ground, 
When others pick it up, becomes a gem ! 
We grasp at all the wealth it is to them ; 
And by reflected light its worth is found. 
Yet for us still 't is nothing ! and that zeal 
Of false appreciation quickly fades. 
This truth is little known to human shades, 
How rare from their own instinct 't is to feel ! 
They waste the soul with spurious desire, 
That is not the ripe flame upon the bough. 

Mark where the pressing wind shoots javelin-like 
Its skeleton shadow on the broad-backed wave ! 
Here is a fitting spot to dig Love's grave ; 
Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and 

strike. 
And dart their hissing tongues high up the sand : 
In hearing of the ocean, and in sight 
Of those ribbed wind-streaks running into white. 
If I the death of Love had deeply planned, 
I never could have made it half so sure, 
As by the unblessed kisses which upbraid 
The full- waked sense ; or, failing that, degrade ! 



POEMS. 241 



'T is morning : but no morning can restore 
What we have forfeited. I see no sin : 
The wrong is mix'd. In tragic life, God wot, 
No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : 
We are betrayed by what is false within. 



YOUNG REYNARD. 

I. 

Gracefullest leaper, the dappled fox cub 
Curves over brambles with berries and buds, 
Light as a bubble that flies from the tub 
Whisked by the laundry-wife out of her suds. 
Wavy he comes, woolly all at his ease, 
Elegant, fashioned to foot with the deuce ; 
Nature's own prince of the dance : then he sees 
Me, and retires as if making excuse. 

II. 

Never closed minuet courtlier ! Soon 
Cub-hunting troops were abroad, and a yelp 
Told of sure scent ; ere the strike upon noon 
Reynard the younger lay far beyond help. 

16 



242 POEMS, 



Wild, my poor friend, has the fate to be chased, 
Civil will conquer : were 't other 't were worse. 
Fair, by the flushed early morning embraced, 
Haply you live a day longer in verse. 



MARTIN'S PUZZLE. 
I. 

There she goes up the street with her book in her 
hand 

And her " Good morning, Martin ! " — Ay, lass, how 
d'ye do? 

*' Very well, thank you, Martin ! " — I can't under- 
stand ! 

I might just as well never have cobbled a 
shoe. 

I can't understand it. She talks like a song ; 

Her voice takes your ear like the ring of a 
glass j 

She seems to give gladness while limping along, 

Yet sinner ne'er suffered like that little lass. 



POEMS, 243 



II. 

First, a fool of a boy ran her dowTi with a cart, 
Then her fool of a father — a blacksmith by 

trade — 
Why the deuce does he tell us it half broke his 

heart ! 
His heart ! — where 's the leg of the poor Httle 

maid ! 
Well, that 's not enough ; they must push her 

down-stairs, 
To make her go crooked : but why count the 

list? 
If it's right to suppose that our human affairs 
Are all ordered by Heaven — there bang goes my 

fist! 

III. 

For if angels can look on such sights — never 
mind ! 

When you 're next to blaspheming, it 's best to 
be mum. 

The parson declares that her woes were n't de- 
signed ; 

But then, with the parson it 's all kingdom come. 



244 POEMS, 



Lose a leg, save a soul — a convenient text ; 
I call it Tea doctrine, not savouring of God. 
When poor little Molly wants ^ chastening,' why, 

next 
The Archangel Michael might taste of the rod. 

IV. 

But to see the poor darling go limping for miles 
To read books to sick people ! — and just of an age 
When girls learn the meaning of ribands and smiles ! 
Makes me feel like a squirrel that turns in a cage. 
The more I push thinking the more I revolve : 
I never get farther ; — and as to her face, 
It starts up when near on my puzzle I solve. 
And says, "This crushed body seems such a sad 
case." 

Y. 

Not that she 's for complaining : she reads to earn 

pence ; 
And from those who can't pay simple thanks are 

enough. 
Does she leave lamentation for chaps without 

sense? 
Howsoever, she 's made up of wonderful stuff. 



POEMS, 245 



Ay, the soul in her body must be a stout cord ; 
She sings Uttle hymns at the close of the day, 
Though she has but three fingers to lift to the Lord 
And only one leg to kneel down with to pray. 

VI. 

What I ask is, Why persecute such a poor dear, 
If there 's Law above all ? Answer that if you can ! 
Irreligious I 'm not ; but I look on this sphere 
As a place where a man should just think like a 

man. 
It is n't fair dealing ! But, contrariwise. 
Do bullets in battle the wicked select? 
Why, then it 's all chance-work ! And yet, in her 

eyes. 
She holds a fixed something by which I am checked. 

vn. 

Yonder riband of sunshine, aslope on the wall, 
If you eye it a minute '11 have the same look : 
So kind ! and so merciful ! God of us all ! 
It 's the very same lesson we get from the Book. 
Then is Life but a trial ? Is that what is meant ? 
Some must toil, and some perish, for others below ; 



^o^ 



246 POEMS. 



The injustice to each spreads a common content. 
Ay ! I Ve lost it again, for it can't be quite so. 

YIII. 

She 's the victim of fools ; that seems nearer the 

mark. 
On earth there are engines and numerous fools. 
Why the Lord can permit them, we 're still in the 

dark; 
He does, and in some sort of way they 're his 

tools. 
It 's a roundabout way, with respect let me add, 
If Molly goes crippled that we may be taught ; 
But perhaps it 's the only way, though it 's so bad ; 
In that case we '11 bow down our heads, — as we 

ought. 

IX. 

But the worst of me is that when I bow my head, 
I perceive a thought wriggling away in the dust. 
And I follow its track, quite forgetful instead 
Of humble acceptance, for question I must ! 
Here 's a creature made carefully — carefully made 1 
Put together with craft, and then stamped on, and 
why? 



POEMS, 247 



The answer seems nowhere ; it *s discord that *s 

played. 
The sky 's a blue disk ! — an implacable sky. 

X. 

Stop a moment. I seize an idea from the pit : 
They tell us that discord, though discord alone, 
Can be harmony when the notes properly fit ; 
Am I judging all things from a single false tone? 
Is the Universe one immense Organ that rolls 
From devils to angels? I 'm blind with the sight, 
It pours such a splendour on heaps of poor souls. 
I might try at kneeling with Molly to-night. 



INDEX. 



INDEX. 



Accuracy of vision, 137. 

Action, means life, 134. 

Actions, we are now and then above them, 34. 

Addle-pated, thinking many things, 24. 

Aim, at stars, 75 ; man's, 103 ; at ideal life, 122. 

Ale and Eve, 35. 

Ambition, over sensitive, 166. 

Ambitions, first, 36. 

Anchor the heart, 12. 

Anecdotes, 158. 

Aphhorist reads himself, 24, 

Aristocracy, worship of, 74. 

Astronomers condescending, 134. 

Audacity of expression, 49. 

August, month of sober maturity, 166. 

Autumn, the primrose blooms, 26. 

Baggage, women in the rear, 124. 

Beauchampism, 97. 

Beauty, power in, 14 ; for the hero, 27 ; of laws, 89 ; is rare, 152. 

Bone and marrow of study, 76. 

Bone in a boy's mind, 99. 

Books, peculiarity of, 99. 

Bookworm women, 166. 

Boys putting down ciphers, 72. 

Brainless in art and statecraft, 134. 

Burlesque Irishman, 153. 



252 ' INDEX. 

Character of a bullet, 25. 

Characteristics of girls, 57. 

Charity, Mrs. Berry's, 22. 

Children think for themselves, 16 ; of wealth, 117. 

Church, stands for drama, 109. 

Cleopatra, 158. 

Cleverness in a woman, 92. 

Comedies, youth's tragedies, 37. 

Comfort, religion of, 128. 

Convictions, first impressions, 98. 

Conventionalism, a dash of, 105. 

Country, people of, 58 ; true to itself, 65. 

Coward among us, 26. 

Creed that rose in heaven, 125. 

Critic, office of, 58. 

Cynicism, intellectual, 86. 

Danger of little knowledge, 16. 

Deathlessness in what we do, 57. 

Debate in Baronet's mind, 19. 

Desire to realize gains, 115. 

Despair, wilful business, 53. 

Devil, 167. 

Digestion weak for wrath, 19. 

Dinner, every, has its special topic, yj ; gives good dinners, 147. 

Dinner-tables, people at them, 85. 

Disappointment, 51. 

Drolleries like odors, 147, 

Dyspepsy, 13. 

Each woman, Eve, 17. 

Earnestness its own cure, 109. 

Earth was not earth, 200. 

Earth's secret, 200. 

Eclipse, strange when the hue of truth, 85. 

Education for women, iii. 



INDEX. 253 



English, middle class, 128, 129. 

Englishwomen, 157. 

Enthusiasm does not know monotony, 174. 

Esteem 's a mellow thing, 93. 

Eternal, sense of the, 146. 

Experience of the priest in our country, 125. 



Families, when worthy of veneration, 115. 

Fate, attached to some women, 57. 

February blew southwest, 182. 

Fever, Carry your fever to the Alps, 80. 

Fiction, shun those who cry out against it, 136. 

Flattery of beholding a great assembly, 66. 

Fools, compassion for them, 61 ; to be set spinning, 94. 

Fortress, every one its weak gate, 10. 

France, 210. 

Girl, Let a girl talk with her own heart, 37. 
God of the world, 18. 
Great-hearted Alvan, 138. 
Green-tea talk, 168. 



Heads move a conspiracy, 65. 

Heaven, to be close with, 204. 

Heavens propitious to true lovers, 11. 

Heights to right and left, 184. 

Hero of two women, 93. 

Heroes not in the habit of wording declarations of war, 23. 

Heroics, " He's off in his heroics," 26. 

Heroine in common with hero, 24. 

Highly civilized natures, 48. 

Honeymoon shining, 18. 

Honeymoon Mahomet's minute, 19. 

Hope and not be impatient, 72. 

Hymeneal rumours, 171. 



254 INDEX. 



Ideal of conduct for women, %"]. 

Ideas, language too gross for, 12. 

Idols, critical of them, 19. 

Imagination misled the old man, 61 ; pale flower of, 123. 

Immeasurable love, 9. 

Indigestion of wrath, 21. 

Infants are said to have ideas, 177. 

Irishmen like horses, 153. 

Irresistible, the presence of the, 135. 

Italian hght, 135. 

Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism, 90. 
Jokes, good jokes not good policy, 178. 
Judgments, men's, of women, 146. 

Knowledge, danger of a little, 16. 

Lady, manners of, 61. 

Language of social extremes, 20; flowed from Renee, 112. 

Language, how charged with it is a dog's tail ! 177. 

Laugh, promptness to, 21. 

Letters, old, 59 ; of a lover, loi. 

Life, 157, 174- 

Light literature, 136. 

London, 163. 

Love, the blessed wand, 9 ; immeasurable, 9 ; the soul's ordeal, 11 ; 

the charioteer, 15 ; in a young girl, y] ; and self-love, 38 ; the 

season of egoism, 87; slavery of, 112; old love reviving, 113; 

women read men by it, 123; strength in love, 136; and man, 

139 ; to write of, 186, 187, 188. 
Lover, letters of a, 10 1. 
Lovers, heavens propitious to, 11 ; happy lovers, 11. 

Maidens and their instincts, 89. 
Makers of proverbs, 26. 
Malice, barb of beauty, 53. 



INDEX, 255 



Man who speculates, 50 ; the laughing animal, 50 ; aim to culmi- 
nate, 58 ; who looks on fallen women, 60 ; his review of life, 'j'] ; 
the strict man of honour, 91 ; who can be a friend, 92 ; a rough 
man, 121 ; for arbiter, 157. 

Manners of a lady, 61. 

Marriage, 154. 

Matrimony, rosy and autumnal view, 15 ; Mrs. Berry's view, 25. 

Men in most of us, 50 ; whose pride is their backbone, 86 ; who do 
not live in the present, 123; desire a still woman, 146; in the 
world, 156. 

Men and women mysterious, 17 ; alike, 133. 

Middle course, none for rich, 29. 

Mind, consider sort of mind, 10 ; after oblivion, 169. 

Minds of half-earnest men, 81. 

Money, clothing for gentleman, 34. 

Monsters, in politics, 150. 

Moon surpassingly bright, 190. 

Moral path, 169. 

Mortals, silly sheep, 36. 

Music, insensibility to it, 116. 

Nature, though heathenish, 13 ; speaks to Richard Feverel, 190, 
191. 

Nerve, touching a nerve, yj. 

Nonsense of enthusiasts, 36. 

Note in material fashions, 36. 

Nothing but poetry makes romances possible, 179. 

Observation an enduring pleasure, 157. 
Opinions in packets, 154. 

Pagan, a virtue, 40. 
Parasites complete the animal, 46. 
Parsons and petticoats, 'jZ. 
Passion, strength in, 53. 
Passive, in calamity, 21. 
Pathos a tide, 91. 



256 INDEX. 



Peep-show, 152. 

Philosophical geography, 16. 

Philosophy, spirit of modern, 75 ; bids us see ourselves, 148 ; how 

may we know we have reached her, 148. 
Pilgrim, he may be wrong, 17. 
Pitch and tar in politics, 99. 
Poetic and commonplace, 163. 
Poetry, nonsense, 10 ; love, 11. 
Poets and women, 173. 
Power of resisting invasion, 163. 
Pray, Can you pray ? 50. 
Prayer is good, 126. 

Prayer, our prayers, 126 ; the fountain of prayer, 127. 
Preacher, the born, 9. 
Pride, the one developed faculty, -i^Z' 
Priests in our country, 125. 

Professors, prophets, masters, each his creed, 125. 
Projector of plots, 34. 
Prose can paint evening, 163. 
Puns the small-pox of language, 79. 
Purpose wedded to plans, 34. 

Radicals marching to triumph, 114. 

Rain had fallen, 182 ; after, 182. 

Rare as an Epic song, 34. 

Religion of England, 128. 

Remarks have measured distances, 143. 

Rich, love the nations, 120. 

Ridicule, our own, knocks the strength out of us, 48. 

Rubicon, it blew hard when Caesar crossed, 15. 

Sailing on a cruise is like, 122. 
Science, Sir Austin looked at life as a, 11. 
Selection can only be made from a crowd, 48. 
Self-submerged, 53. 
Sense of honour, 38. 
Sentimental people, 145. 



INDEX, 257 



Sentimentalists seek to enjoy, 13 ; a natural growth, 45 ; like chil- 
dren, 49. 
Service, noblest office on earth, 128 ; our destiny, 145. 
Simplicity, 169. 

Skill and care rescue a drowned wretch, 14. 
Slumberers roused in darkness, 120. 
Social sewerage, 23. 
Song, rare as an Epic, 34. 
Souls, weak souls, 138. 

Speech, small change, 19 ; hauled from the depth, 2>Z' 
Strength in love, 136. 
Struggle with society, 39. 
Systems fortified by philosophy, 147, 186. 

Temper, best-bottled, 71. 

Think, Who can think and not think hopefully? 172. 

Thirst not enjoyment, 122 ; for hopeful views, 162. 

Tinkler, called piano, 103. 

Titles, way to defend them, 100. 

Truth, a rough, 93. 

Valley, elevation above, 183. 

Vanity chief traitor, i 'j'}^. 

Veterans in their arm-chairs, 58. 

Vittoria read the faces of the mornings, 67. 

Wealth, children of, 117. 

Women, each one an Eve, 17 ; a soft woman, 18 ; deeply bound to 
habit, 35 ; repose upon positive men, 46 ; seeking an anomaly, 
59; make new spheres, 59; the noblest order of, 76; ideal 
for, '^']\ cowards, 91 ; of intellect, 92 ; tried and steadfast, 93; 
education for, 1 1 1 ; like to be loved, 1 1 1 ; artificial, 117; our 
awful baggage, 124 ; who can hold one back? 137 ; what a woman 
thinks of women, 143 ; conversationally, 144 ; men's opinion 
of, 146 ; judgments upon, 146 loneliness of, 146 ; motive life 
of, 147; and weather, 152; woman a mute, 154 hypocrites, 
157; witty, 164, 



258 INDEX. 



Words big in the mouth, 93. 
Work is medicine, 60 ; at people, 116. 

World variable, 18; in motion, 119; ruthless, 156; of a fluid civil- 
ization, 157; imagination, 167. 

Young man who can look at fallen women with a noble eye, 60. 
Young men and old men our hope, 162. 

Youth, eating his heart, 33 ; called upon to look up, 47 ; soul of, 66. 
Youths, like Pope's women, 33. 



University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



